by Tim Pratt
The war-wagons were arrayed in the camp’s outer ring, with bowmen on guard in each, and four of Quelamia’s apprentices spread out, each armed with a rod enchanted to throw fireballs or spit lightning or spawn freezing winds. Inside the defensive ring were the tents of the soldiers, and inside that, those of the laborers and the cook wagons. At the very center stood three wagons that were, essentially, houses on wheels. The smallest was Krailash’s, an unassuming wooden box on wheels with arrowslit windows; the armor reinforcements didn’t show.
Beside it, like a tropical bird perched next to a drab sparrow, rested Quelamia’s wagon, more a sculpture than a dwelling, made of living wood from the Feywild. Where Krailash’s quarters were all squares and angles, Quelamia’s looked more or less like a live tree somehow growing impossibly on a wheeled platform, complete with leafy branches that sometimes bore strange fruit. No ox ever pulled her cart: it moved under its own powers, immense wheels rolling smoothly over even uneven terrain, branches swaying. Trust a wizard to make a home in such a strange whimsy.
The final wheeled home was even more impressive, in its way, since it had been made by wealth, not magic. The wagon had the look of a cozy cottage, made of rare kopak wood—strong, flexible, and the color of sunlight streaming through jasmine honey—joined seamlessly and shaped by a master craftsman, with decorative carvings around the door and roofline. The windows were made of real glass, and there was even a working fireplace and chimney, as if anyone needed heat in the jungle. The front door swung wide when Krailash approached, and Alaia herself stood in the doorway, holding the now-sleeping infant child in her arms. Her hair was long and black, and though Krailash was no judge of human beauty, he’d heard it said Alaia was attractive, in a severe and aloof way. Certainly her blue eyes seemed to hold humor and strength in careful balance: she was seldom angry, never acted in haste, and nothing could sway her from her course once she’d chosen it.
Those were exceptionally good character traits for a merchant princess of the Serrat family. Krailash had never thought of his employer as motherly, but she held the child as comfortably as if it were her own. “Come in,” she said, standing aside, and Krailash entered her home.
The interior might have been a room from a lavish country estate, but if one looked closely, one could see the small efficiencies and precautions: tables that folded up into the wall to stay out of the way, furniture fixed in place on the floor, shelves and cupboards that could be secured to prevent the contents spilling on bumpy roads, magical lights instead of candles—because magical lights couldn’t fall over and catch the carriage on fire. A few of the lady’s small carved totems stood on shelves, looking merely decorative to the untrained eye, but allowing Alaia easier access to her vast shamanic powers if the caravan were ever directly threatened.
Alaia shut the door behind them and sat in her customary armchair, gesturing for Krailash to sit on the ironwood bench—the one utilitarian piece of furniture in the place, simple and strong, kept just for him.
“Tell me about this,” she said, looking down at the infant.
So Krailash told her: the child’s cry, the sounds of violence, the ruined temple, the opening to the Underdark, the disappearance of Rainer. She took it all in silently, then said, “Do you think we’re in danger?”
Krailash nodded. “Of course I do. Thinking we’re in danger is my job. But we are … rather formidable. My guards, combined with Quelamia’s magic, make us a difficult target. But they seized one of my men, and we have to assume they’ll interrogate him and find out the details of our defenses. I don’t know what they’ll do with that information, though. Attack us, or leave well enough alone? The problem is, the enemy is unknown, in kind and in motivation. Are they slavers? Devotees of some mad god? Are they drow? Duergar? The Underdark is vast, home to countless races, and I don’t know enough about the place to separate the stories I’ve heard from truth. I have to assume the danger is real. That we could be attacked, and overwhelmed, and all of us dragged into the dark.”
“What do you propose?” Alaia said. “This is the best place for the terazul harvest. The secondary and tertiary sites are less fruitful, and not really far enough away to make a difference anyway. I’m loath to leave, and what—never come back?”
“That’s precisely what I advise.”
“And if I reject that advice?” A small smile touched her lips. “As you know I’m inclined to do?”
“An overwhelming show of force,” Krailash said. “To shut off this particular passageway to the surface, and show them we’re not to be trifled with.”
“Mmm,” Alaia said. “You’ll want Quelamia.”
“I will.”
“She gave up being a war wizard before I was born. She won’t like it.”
Krailash shrugged. The question of liking, or not liking, a particular chore seemed irrelevant to him. Duty was duty. One did what was necessary. “She has the power, though. She doesn’t often need to use it, but she can.”
“Oh, yes. The family pays her for what she can do, as much as we pay her for what she actually does. All right. Tell her I’ve agreed.”
Krailash stood, then hesitated. He nodded at the child. “What will you do with …” He almost said “it,” but Alaia had an unusual look of tenderness in her gaze as she looked at the infant, so he said “… her?”
“Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? You know, there are factions in the family that want to see me married off and bearing children, before I get too old. Of course, some of them mutter that I’m too old already. But this little one … Well, it sounds like all her people are dead or, at least, lost. We have some obligation to care for her. Assuming she’s healthy and otherwise sound, I thought I might adopt her.”
Krailash nodded slowly. That wasn’t unheard of in Alaia’s family, and usually happened a few times every generation. The family was the business, and among the Serrats of Delzimmer, marriages were made carefully, for maximum tactical and financial advantage, but over the generations they had occasionally adopted orphans and foundlings, on the theory that such outside additions kept the bloodline fresh. There was no particular risk in the practice. If the adoptees proved profligate or unreliable or otherwise unsuitable to business, it was no matter—they were shunted into some irrelevant side-channel of the family’s sprawling enterprises and given an allowance sufficient to keep them occupied. No one became fully vested in the family, given voting power or a percentage of the family profits, until they’d reached at least their late teens and proven themselves responsible and worthy, or proven themselves suitable only for irrelevant work or, in extreme cases, exile from the family. “I see. Would you want to train her in the business side of things, or the more, ah, practical aspects?”
“Will you be forced to teach her to swing a sword, you mean?” Alaia smiled. “She’s not dragonborn, Krailash, we humans don’t develop that quickly—we’ve got years to see where her aptitudes lie, if anywhere at all. That’s all assuming she survives. I worry about this. I think it’s a rash? What do you think?” She unwrapped the blanket carefully, and beckoned Krailash. He had no particular desire to closely examine the skin diseases of a human child, but he did as she bid him, squinting at the tiny creature, who sighed as Alaia turned her over.
There was a patch of greenish flesh in the small of the child’s back, vaguely diamond-shaped. It might have been a birthmark, except it was raised, and rough to the touch. “It looks like …”
“Scales,” Alaia said. “Just like scales. Isn’t that odd? I’ve heard of all manner of jungle diseases, but never one that turned flesh scaly. There’s a terrible disease, where people are born with thick, scaly flesh, almost crocodilian, but other birth defects always come along with it—facial deformities and the like. This child appears perfectly ordinary and healthy otherwise, except … it’s the oddest thing … she doesn’t appear to have a navel. Her belly’s all smooth. Isn’t that strange?”
“I never saw the need for a bellybutton,” Krailas
h rumbled.
“We humans do. Though if she were born premature, the navel might be very small, perhaps there’s a tiny depression after all. But, really, I’m less concerned about the absence of something ordinary than the presence of something abnormal. Those scales worry me. I suppose it may be a nasty fungus, or …” She half-smiled. “Perhaps she’s just got a little dragon in her ancestry, hmm?”
“That would be a blessing, wouldn’t it?” Krailash said. “You can have one of the family healers in Edgwater examine her when we return. If nothing else, they can cut the scales away.” He stood. “I should go.”
“Yes,” Alaia said, wrapping the child back up in the blanket, and cooing to her gently. “Go, and rain hell on the monsters who made this poor girl an orphan.”
Krailash went down the steps from Alaia’s wagon and started toward Quelamia’s trailer. After half-a-dozen steps he stopped, frowning at the ramshackle, black-painted cart that had suddenly appeared before him. How odd. Where had it come from? A fourth wagon in the camp’s center, as big as his own, with windows in the shape of oversized humanoid skulls with glass for eyes, a metal chimney pipe jutting crookedly from the roof, and a clacking mobile of animal bones dangling by the door?
The door banged open, and a tiefling leaned out. Purple hair stuck up in ill-tended tufts from the back of her head, sharp horns jutted from her pale red forehead, and her dark eyes twinkled with amusement. A long black pipe dangled from the corner of her mouth, and she exhaled smoke through her nostrils, making her look even more infernal than she might otherwise.
“Hello, Rusty,” she said.
Glory. Another of the important figures in camp, but one whose existence had slipped Krailash’s mind entirely, as it almost always did unless he were standing face-to-face with her. He hadn’t even noticed her wagon until he’d nearly walked into it. Because she hadn’t wanted him to. She was not invisible but forgettable, slipping from the minds of everyone who met her except Alaia and other leaders of the family. That forgettable quality meant that Krailash’s security plans seldom involved protecting her, but Glory liked it that way. She could, she said, protect herself, and what better protection than going unnoticed? Now that he saw her, all his memories about her returned, and most of them weren’t particularly fond.
“There might be trouble coming,” he said. “You’d better go back to … whatever you do in there. For your own safety.” The dragonborn and the tiefling races had a long tradition of enmity, though the clash of their respective empires was lost in such dim mists of history that the dislike between Krailash and Glory was more theoretical than practical. The fact that she was a psion—a master of meddling with minds—troubled him far more than her infernal ancestry. Krailash was a warrior, and a person of honor, and Glory’s ability to scramble the memories and motivations of her enemies struck him as cowardly.
She took another deep puff on her pipe, the foul smell of burning herbs wafting into Krailash’s face. “Nice of you to worry about me. What is it this time? Giant centipedes? Another troop of apes guarding a temple no one even remembers?”
“Someone from the Underdark abducted several nearby villagers, and they may attempt to attack the caravan. Alaia would be annoyed if I allowed you to be kidnapped.” Krailash was uncomfortable with Glory’s role in the caravan, but he understood her powers were necessary to protect the family’s trade secrets from the many would-be rivals who sought to usurp their power and wealth. In some ways, she was the most important member of the caravan, though she mostly just lounged around and smoked and drank. The family paid her well for very little work, but, then, they were paying her for the experience of her long years, not the labor of a few hours.
“Ha. Any cave-dwelling scum who try to kidnap me will end up working for me, Krailash. So don’t worry on my account.”
“There are things in the Dark that don’t have minds to meddle with, demonspawn. And an arrow flying toward you cannot be persuaded to strike someone else instead.”
“Point taken, Rusty. Are you going to jump into the pit with a dagger in your teeth, then?”
“That’s my usual preference. But I’m going to enlist the help of Quelamia.”
A shadow crossed the tiefling’s face. Quelamia’s mind was exceedingly well-protected, and Glory didn’t like people she couldn’t read. She changed the subject quickly. “Who’s the newcomer to camp?”
Krailash frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I sense a new mind.”
“Ah. A human infant left behind when her family was stolen away. Alaia is taking care of her now.”
“Huh. There’s something strange about her mind.” The tiefling shrugged. “Probably just that she’s a baby. Their tiny minds are little maelstroms swirling with unregulated sensory inputs. Good luck with your monster-hunting, Rusty.” She disappeared back into her wagon, slamming the door and making the mobile of bones clatter.
Krailash walked around her wagon to Quelamia’s home, the memory of his encounter with Glory already receding in his mind. He thumped the unbroken trunk of the tree-on-wheels where Quelamia lived with his fist, and a hole—a knothole, really—opened in the bark. The eladrin stuck her head out, pale gold hair hanging long past her shoulders, pointed ears peeking out. Her eyes were unbroken orbs of pale blue, like the glaze on a fine ceramic pot, and though her pupil-less gaze seemed blank, Krailash knew her eyes took in more than his ever could, sometimes in two worlds at once. She said, “Yes?” with her usual absent-minded quality, as if she were looking past him into the farther reaches of the Feywild, that world beyond this world that she had once called home.
Krailash explained about the crying child, the signs of massacre, the pit he’d found in the temple, and the disappearance of his guardsman. Quelamia’s expression became vaguely troubled when he mentioned the Underdark. “If you want us to go down there …” she began, but Krailash shook his head.
“Our duty is to the caravan. Sad as I am to lose Rainer and to see the human child made an orphan, we must protect the safety of Alaia’s holdings, and a trip into the dark against unknown enemies is too dangerous.”
“Then what did you have in mind?” Quelamia asked.
“Closing up the passageway from the Underdark to the surface,” Krailash said.
Quelamia nodded. “I see. Let me get my staff.” She disappeared back into her tree, and returned to the small opening a moment later bearing a brown branch as long as she was tall, with leaves sprouting from shoots along its length—it was a part of her own living tree somehow detached and made into a weapon and implement of power. She flickered, and a moment later was standing beside Krailash, the tree’s trunk once again closed and unbroken. “Do the others in camp know what’s happened?”
“No, I only told Alaia, and, ah—” He blinked. “Just … just Alaia, I think.”
Quelamia nodded, looking pointedly at the spot between her wagon and Alaia’s—in other words, looking at nothing in particular as far as Krailash could see—and said, “Let’s see what we can do about this hole in the ground. Lead the way.”
Krailash had no fear with Quelamia at his side. The jungle seemed to make way for her as she walked, rendering his usual hack-and-slash trailbreaking unnecessary. Branches swayed aside and thorns turned their sharp points away when they passed. The wizard was the most powerful member of the caravan, stronger in magic even than Alaia, and was so valuable to the family that she received a percentage of the organization’s profits rather than a normal salary, something only fully vested members of the Serrat family usually received. While Krailash’s duties were essentially seasonal, with work only required of him during the harvesting season and the long trek of the caravans from the city to the jungle and back again, Quelamia worked actively for the family year-round, advising and assisting the members of the other branches of the family as well as Alaia’s own Travelers.
Soon they reached the ruined temple, and Quelamia stepped inside briefly to look at the pit, but quickly returned. Sh
e looked quite troubled—which, for her, meant merely a line appearing briefly on her forehead—and directed Krailash to walk some distance away from the structure. “Stay close to me, dragonborn,” she said, raising her staff. “I would not have you hurt.”
The eladrin lifted her staff, and a wind rose from nowhere, making her long hair blow back and her pale green robe flutter. The trees towering above them groaned, and Krailash looked up in alarm as the canopy of leaves and branches directly overhead began to blacken and turn to smoke, revealing a nearly perfect circle of blue sky as neat as a hole cut in a sheet of paper. Quelamia mouthed syllables that seemed to crash and rumble as they left her mouth, less words than the sound of volcanic rumbles and eruptions, and points of reddish light appeared in the sky. The lights glowed brighter and grew in size, and a high-pitched whistle like a dozen boiling teakettles commenced as they approached. Krailash instinctively crouched and lifted his shield before him when the first flaming chunk of anvil-sized rock smashed into the roof of the temple with a deafening boom. The trees all around them rocked back in the wind of the first impact, but Krailash felt nothing, and as he lowered the shield he could see particles of debris pattering harmlessly off the invisible dome of force that protected Quelamia and himself. Still she chanted, and more meteors streaked down, a storm of burning rock that smashed the temple into rubble. Krailash allowed himself to gaze in wonder, enjoying the sight of such powerful magic unleashed: better than the fireworks shot off above the gulf in Delzimmer to celebrate the Feast of the Moon Festival.
After a few moments the falling stars stopped coming, the unnatural wind blowing Quelamia’s hair ceased, and she lowered her staff, gazing at the devastation before them. Where the temple had stood was only a depression in the earth, filled with rubble. Quelamia approached, head cocked, and then slammed the base of her staff into the ground, where it stuck. Krailash knew from past experience that nothing would move that staff, unless Quelamia willed it; the branch was as a solidly rooted as a five-thousand-year-old oak. The wizard held out her hands before her, palms facing each other at shoulder width apart, and then gradually pushed her hands together.
