by Tim Pratt
“Without even scraping my knees,” she said. “Nice thing about magical robes—they tend to adjust to fit. All right, now that I’ve held everyone up, let’s get moving.”
When they came back to the false gravesite, the hole was big enough for the whole party to descend. Krailash sent three men ahead, then himself, then Alaia, and the last three men in the back. They were all well-provisioned and well-armed. Krailash began to regret bringing his great battle-axe Thunder’s Edge when they entered the old mining tunnel, because it would be impossible to swing with any power in such confined space, especially with his allies pressed in so close.
“Wait,” Alaia said, and the company halted. “My spirit companion is just up ahead, in a sort of nexus room connecting many of these tunnels, and it senses movement.” Her eyes widened. “Derro! They’re coming in from all sides, they’re going to—”
The guard at the front of the tunnel screamed as dozens of crossbow bolts struck him simultaneously, his death cry a counterpoint to the demented giggling of the onrushing derro attackers.
JULEN WOKE UP WITH ENTIRELY TOO MUCH UNDERSTANDING. There was no blissful moment of confusion, no disorientation, no instant when he thought he might be having a terrible nightmare. His years of training at the hands of the Guardians had made such self-delusions impossible, and when consciousness returned to him, he knew exactly what was happening.
He’d fallen into a pit, and been drugged and captured by derro slavers, and his future would either be very short and very unpleasant, or very long and indescribably more unpleasant. The heavy metal shackles binding his ankles were attached to similar cuffs around his wrists, the two sets of restraints joined by short chains, forcing his knees into a drawn-up position. He lay on his left side, curled body scraping painfully against the rough tunnel floor as his captors dragged him by a long chain attached to the shackles. There was precious little to see, as the tunnel was dark, and the derro apparently had no need for light. They weren’t giggling, but they were talking to themselves, in guttural tones that must have been Deep Speech, along with occasional fragments of Common, words that made no sense out of context and probably didn’t make much sense anyway: “melon,” “candlelight,” “fencepost,” “dung,” “matrimony.”
The histories he’d read all said derro were mad, but that only made them more dangerous. His father had taken him to an asylum once, to see a man who’d killed fourteen respectable women in Delzimmer before being captured. That man had chatted amiably with voices only he could hear, and claimed to take his murderous instructions from a neighbor’s pet wolfhound—the wolfhound had been examined, and was determined to be an ordinary dog, not a lycanthrope or demon in disguise or anything else unusual, and certainly nothing capable of controlling a man’s mind. The killer had, unquestionably, been insane, but he’d eluded the authorities for months, carefully laying false trails that pointed blame toward his imaginary enemies, and his booby-trapped basement lair had taken the lives of a dozen city guards before he was apprehended. His father had told him all that, and said, “You see, Julen, madness doesn’t mean stupidity. The mad can be clever and cunning—sometimes even wise—and because their motivations are often impossible for sane men to comprehend, they are almost impossible to predict and troublesome to manipulate. Some like to employ the mad as assassins or enforcers or ultimate threats, but I advise against it. If such measures seem necessary, invest in a skilled actor who can pretend to madness. Actors are easily manipulated, especially by the lever of vanity, and often have the sort of moral flexibility that proves useful in our operatives.”
The derro weren’t actors. They were twisted beings, despised even by the other races in the Underdark, tainted by their dark researches and assignations with aberrations, and they couldn’t be bribed, or begged, or outsmarted, or reasoned with, which limited his diplomatic options. Trying to kill the mad was also troublesome, as they often fought on happily when sane people would have given in to the inevitability of death. The situation wasn’t hopeless—the Guardians held that almost no situation was—but it was certainly dire. Escaping from the derro was the main priority.
Julen examined the shackles as best he could by feel, probing for the lock with his fingertips, because he’d been lockpicking since he was old enough to hold a burglar’s tools. But there was no lock, and as he shifted, the metal grew warm and contracted, squeezing his hands and ankles more tightly. Magic, then. That was problematic. He wondered if the green knife in his pack could help, but one of the derro must have taken it. The dagger at his belt was also gone, but the throwing knives were still hidden in his sleeves. No help now, in this bump-and-drag situation, but of potential use later.
There was something else up his sleeve: the piece of pale blue chalk he’d found in his pack. He’d secreted it there with some idea of marking their descent through this labyrinth so they could find their way up again.
“It’s not a labyrinth,” the derro dragging him said in an unsteady, high-pitched voice, like a drunken child’s. “Common mistake. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has only a single path. It’s a circuitous path, takes a long time to traverse, and there are lots of twists and turns, but there are no branch paths, no moments of choice, no dead ends—you can’t get lost in a labyrinth, you can just get bored. A labyrinth is a means of meditation, or a way to make a minotaur’s mealtime more entertaining for the watchers. But this, this is no labyrinth. There are paths here with a thousand branches, that all end in death. It’s more like a maze, though not one of your silly garden mazes with hedges. This is a maze that spreads out front and back and to and fro and up and down, all bridges and pits and overs and unders. You can’t map it because there are things here that eat maps and maps that eat mapmakers and things that eat appetites.” The voice lapsed into silence.
After a long moment, Julen said, “You can read minds?” That seemed the only answer, unless Julen had been muttering about labyrinths aloud, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t fallen that far from the heights of his Guardian training.
“What? No one can read minds. There are no minds to read except mine, because mine is the only real mind, and none of you things that pretend to have minds can possibly read a mind like mine.” There was a sound of a scuffle, and the derro who’d spoken squawked in pain. The relentlessly scraping forward motion stopped, and the chains holding Julen went slack. He considered trying to escape, but he would have had to crab-scuttle along the tunnel, and he wouldn’t have made it far, even if the derro were apparently fighting among themselves.
The chains tightened again, and Julen’s movement resumed, and he bumped against a leather-clad body curled on the ground, catching the rank whiff of spilling entrails and fresh blood.
“I see death. It’s a labyrinth of light and dark,” the fallen derro whispered as Julen was dragged past him, and then exhaled its final breath.
Madness, Julen thought. The remaining two derro ahead of him began to sing in a croaky but harmonious way in what he thought was a Dwarvish dialect. But no one tried to take his chalk, so he shook his sleeve until the slim cylinder fell into his hand, and left intermittent marks on the ground as he was dragged. The chalk glowed, faintly luminous, which suggested it was magical, which further suggested it wouldn’t be easily wiped off. He hoped. Leaving Zaltys a trail to follow was probably his best hope of survival, at least until some other opportunity presented itself. Assuming she hadn’t been captured too. What if she was counting on him to save her?
It seemed an unlikely prospect, given her capabilities, but the idea that Zaltys might need him strengthened his resolve to escape, even more than the prospect of being tortured by these chattering, cackling, singing lunatics.
Zaltys was justly proud of her tracking skills, but they weren’t doing her much good at the moment. She had excellent night vision, but that required some stray beam of light somewhere for the eye to capture and amplify. Underground, she was beyond the reach of starlight. There were sunrods left in her pack, but she didn
’t want to give away her position. The derro had stopped giggling, but they must still have been relatively close by, assuming she hadn’t crept right past a branching tunnel. There was a terrible stink there, too, as if she were crawling through a sewer, though there was no particular dampness.
Her foot, sliding along the stone before her to feel the way, hit something heavy but yielding, and metal clinked against leather.
There in the dark, she closed her eyes. If it was a dead body … if it was Julen’s body … Was the salvation of family members she’d never met worth the death of a cousin she knew and liked and even, now that she thought about it, loved?
Crouching, she ran her hands along the body, feeling for the face. Coarse hair, stiff and clotted with filth, touched her fingers. The hair was far too long to be Julen’s; he kept his clipped unfashionably short because, he said, long hair was a liability in a fight. Zaltys, who was a bit vain about her own long dark hair, agreed in theory, but settled for pinning and tying hers up most of the time.
Relief washed through her. This was some dead derro then, probably, but killed by whom? Julen himself? It was possible. She searched the body as best she could by feel, going cautiously in case there were hidden barbs or bare poisoned blades. Hanging from the dead man’s rather bloody belt she found the wicked shape of a repeating hand crossbow, loaded with a full case of five bolts, and extra ammunition besides. She had some of the classical archer’s contempt for crossbows, considering them too easy to use and dismissing their lighter bolts as incapable of the penetrative power of an arrow loosed from a conventional bow, but a crossbow that small would be easier to use at close range, so she let practicality overcome distaste and hung it from her own belt.
She continued her search, trying to think of it as an act akin to skinning an animal instead of looting a corpse, hoping to find a candle-end or a full canteen. She was surprised to find a heavy pack instead. Opening the strap, she felt around inside—there was a sheathed knife, neatly coiled rope, what felt like a small glass bottle, clothes, tasteless field rations, a full adventurer’s pack, just like the one Julen had been carrying. Why would he kill one of his captors but leave his pack behind? Perhaps she was misreading the situation. There were surely numerous other ways to die down here. If only she had some clue, some mark of passage.
Ahead of her, so faint she thought at first it was some hallucination brought on by her eyes straining for light in a lightless place, she detected a streak of pale blue on the floor. She approached it, going on hands and knees, putting her face inches from the floor, and it was unmistakable: a luminous chalk mark an inch or so long. A message from Julen? It seemed like the sort of thing a Guardian-trained spy might use, to leave messages and subtly mark a passage.
She kept moving, and soon found more chalk marks. Not bright enough to illuminate her surroundings, but unmistakable to her light-hungry eyes. Zaltys moved more quickly once she had a trail to follow and was surprised when the tunnel gradually grew lighter. Patches of bluish-green fungus spotted the cavern walls, fed by rivulets of water that oozed down, pooling in depressions on the floor. The light, though dim, was miraculous after so long in the limitless black, and Zaltys studied her surroundings. The tunnel was rounded and curving, rather like being inside the body of an enormous worm—a hideous thought. Multiple splashes of water on the stone indicated the passage of other creatures who’d tromped heedlessly through the puddles recently. Zaltys realized she might soon be faced with the choice of striking down Julen’s captors, or following them at a distance to see where they went. It would be nice to have his help, if only to make him carry his own pack, as the weight of all the supplies was slowing her down. It would also be nice not to be alone down there.
But she wasn’t alone. A snake, as white and unmarked as a derro’s eyes and easily as long as she was tall, slithered through one of the puddles and lifted its pale head toward her, tongue flickering. “How long have you been following me?” she whispered, because she was certain, somehow, that it was no mere passerby out hunting cave rodents. The snake looked away from her, moved smoothly a short distance down the tunnel, then paused, as if waiting for her.
“You could at least offer to carry something for me,” Zaltys muttered, and set off again. The tunnel gradually opened up, the walls moving away and the ceiling rising, and though there were still patches of luminescence, they were farther away, and dimmer as a result. At least she no longer felt as if she were crawling through a gopher burrow—there was a ceiling up there somewhere, but it no longer brushed the top of her head if she didn’t crouch.
The snake was almost invisible again, just a faint pale ribbon, but it seemed to be following the chalk marks just as much as she did—until it abruptly stopped, coiled up on itself, and flopped on its back.
Some snakes played dead when threatened, but there was no threat that Zaltys could sense—nothing on either side of her, nothing behind, nothing in front.
Guardian apes. Not that she literally thought there were apes down there, but she’d told Julen, in the jungle, that temple guardian apes would drop on you from the trees above, that in the wild you had to be aware of the world above as well as the world on all sides, and why would that be any different there?
She lifted the hand crossbow and swept it up over her head in an arc, rapidly working the reloading lever and firing off all five bolts in seconds. Something above her screamed—the sound was like tortured metal, not like any animal she’d ever heard before—and Zaltys dropped Julen’s pack and rolled away. Discretion be damned: she needed to see what she was dealing with. She grabbed a sunrod and struck its end against the uneven stone floor, squinting against the sudden explosion of brightness.
There were jellyfish in the water off the coast of Delzimmer, enough that the harbormaster sometimes organized culls to keep them from clogging up the waterways. She’d seen squid too, though usually on a dinner table or hanging up at a fish market.
The things that filled the air of the caverns above her were a bit like jellyfish, and a bit like squid. They floated in the blackness, their bodies wrinkled hemispheres like human brains, each dangling eight or ten long, wicked-looking tentacles. The one she’d injured lay sprawled on the ground, tentacles flailing, hideous beak opening and closing as it mewled. The beast had no eyes that she could see, which might explain why the others seemed untroubled by her light, but they were descending toward her like deadly spores floating down on a breeze.
Julen would know what these are called, she thought. One of his books would have told him about them. Perhaps they’re intelligent—maybe they have an arrangement with the derro, to let them pass unharmed, and hinder others.
She didn’t know what the things were called, but she supposed she didn’t need to know the name of their race to diminish its numbers. As the tentacles of the descending enemy reached toward her, and their injured fellow mewled and lashed, Zaltys prepared for her first battle in the dark.
IF THE EYELESS CREATURES DESCENDING ALL AROUND couldn’t see Zaltys, then her ability to fade into shadow probably wouldn’t help much. She reloaded the hand crossbow and set it aside, but within reach. The creatures didn’t seem to be in any hurry, so she opened her bow case and removed her new weapon, stringing it quickly. A dozen creatures. She could manage a dozen aimed shots per minute, maybe as many as fifteen on an exceptionally good day, and range wasn’t a problem—unfortunately—as they were getting closer all the time. Shooting up was always awkward, but Krailash had made her practice shooting birds on the wing often enough. She took a mental snapshot of the descending creatures, dropped the sunrod on the ground, and nocked her first arrow.
The bow was a pleasure to use. She’d practiced with it, but that was nothing compared to using it in battle. It was a shorter bow than the one she usually carried, a compact bow, ingeniously recurved to provide the kind of power that longer bows achieved through the simple brute force of better leverage. The bowstring was beautifully made from the sinew of, no doubt
, some legendary animal. She took an arrow—a shame to use an ordinary arrow in such a bow, an arrow kept by the barrel in the family armory, but she knew she should save her more exotic projectiles—from her quiver and nocked it, raising the bow as she pulled back the string. She pushed the bow forward with her left arm as she pulled back the bowstring with her right, straining until her shoulder-blades felt like they might meet; the draw on the bow was heavier than she was accustomed to, but not impossibly so. At full extension, her right index finger just touched the corner of her lips. She looked along the length of the arrow at her first target: the nearest hideous descending creature. Kill the ones nearest first, as she would have more time to kill the ones that were farther away.
Don’t look at the head of the arrow, don’t think of the bow at all, just look at the target. The bow is an extension of the will; the arrow is the instrument of that will.
Loosing an arrow is as simple as letting go. Release the string. The weapon does all the work.
Then do it all over again.
The beasts fell like fat raindrops as the arrows pierced them, and she stepped carefully as she loosed to stay out of the range of their lashing tentacles as they fell—the appendages were barbed, and probably venomous. There were only three left, but they scattered, coming at her from different directions, moving faster, and she realized she’d never be able to hit them all.
But she was still thinking like a woman who possessed no magic. The sunrod made ample shadows, so she stepped into one, and stepped out of another across the cavern, with all three of the creatures in her sights. Three more rapid pulls and releases put them down. She hadn’t needed her hand crossbow after all. She surveyed the room, but there was nothing there still alive, apart from the albino cave snake, which slithered among the fallen bodies, investigating them with interest, heedless of their tentacles but somehow avoiding them too. Zaltys wanted to recover her arrows—her quiver only held eighteen, and she’d used up a dozen. Of the six left, three had enchanted arrowheads given to her by Quelamia—salamander tooth, basilisk slime, crystalline shard of the Living Gate—and the remaining three ordinary arrows were the worst of the bunch. All serviceable, but not as straight and true as the ones she’d used already. Getting the arrows was probably impossible, though. The beasts were mostly still lashing their tentacles, either in their death throes or merely injured. She’d aimed for the central undersides of their bodies, thinking that might be a weak spot, but only three or four seemed outright dead, so perhaps she’d misjudged. She recovered her pack, the sunrod, and her hand crossbow, but could only get three of her arrows back without coming close to the thrashing creatures, several of whom were croaking in a guttural way that might have been speech. They probably were intelligent, then—but they’d looked like death from above to her, and she’d acted accordingly.
