“A sorcerer, you say?” Jezzryd asked.
“Indeed!” Jack folded his arms across his chest and gave the drow mage a nod of professional respect. “I am a master of time and space-well, space, anyway, since time has momentarily bested me-and I am quite talented with illusions as well.”
Dresimil raised an eyebrow. “As it so happens, talent in the arcane arts may be of some use to me,” she said. “If you please, would you provide a small demonstration of your skill? Nothing my guards might construe as an attack, of course. They will shoot you down at once if they believe you are threatening me.”
Jack managed a weak smile. “Of course. Hmm … would a spell of invisibility be acceptable?”
The drow noblewoman glanced to her brothers, who gave small shrugs in reply. “Very well. Proceed when you are ready.”
“Excellent! Now, observe carefully. I have been told that my style is quite unorthodox.” Jack breathed a silent sigh of relief, and called to mind his invisibility spell. He’d never studied magic formally, instead learning his spells through experimentation and natural inclination. Once he’d been told that his talents were born of the wild mythal that lay beneath the city he called home. In fact, the last time he’d been in the presence of the mythal stone, he’d been able to feel it seething with magical energy. Strangely enough, it was quiescent now … but then Jack reminded himself that on the occasion of his previous visit to this place, his enemy Myrkyssa Jelan had been engaged in manipulating the wild mythal to rouse its magic for her purposes. Quiescence was probably its normal condition.
With serene confidence, Jack moved his hands in soft, sweeping passes, as if drawing a cloak over himself, mumbling a few words of nonsense under his breath. The trick of it was of course in the mind, in marrying the sheer desire to vanish from sight with a few careful plucks of the will at the intangible Weave of magic slumbering in his surroundings. To his surprise he found that the unseen currents of magical power were quite distant in this place; he could not really sense them at all. Usually the Weave’s warp and woof were warm and alive, an unseen web of living energy that rippled and thrummed to a mage’s gentle plucking. But Jack was not well versed in the theory of arcane matters, working more by feel and intuition than anything else. He set aside his concerns and focused on the familiar action of working the spell. “Do not be alarmed, Lady Dresimil!” he called out. “I have not teleported myself away. I am here still, but by the power of my magic you cannot perceive me. And this of course is but one of the many spells at my command.”
The drow stared in astonishment at the place where Jack stood, seemingly struck speechless with the skill and deftness of his casting. He grinned from ear to ear in his transparent state, realizing that he had defied their expectations. “Here, allow me to demonstrate that I am indeed physically present,” he continued. “Attend! You see this small stone about six or seven feet in front of Jezzryd’s noble toe? I am picking it up in my hand now.” He lifted the pebble between thumb and forefinger, bobbing it up and down to make sure the drow could see it, and then discarded it over his shoulder. For good measure he stuck his fingers in the corners of his mouth and boggled his eyes at the dark elves, indulging himself in a small jest at their expense as long as he was unseen.
The three drow simply continued to stare in his direction in amazement. Finally Jezzryd managed to speak. “By all Nine Hells,” he whispered. “He’s mad. Completely mad.”
“Lesser minds than mine have of course cracked under the strain of arcane study, but I assure you, my sanity is not in question,” Jack replied. He quickly tiptoed over to a nearby table, and, because the dark elves had not yet offered the simple courtesy of refreshment after dragging him forth from whatever magical prison had held him, indulged himself in a stealthy sip of wine from a fine ewer standing there. Then Jack tiptoed back to where he’d been standing before speaking again. “I trust you are satisfied with my skills?” he said.
Dresimil put her hand to her mouth and seemed to stifle a small cough. “Lord Wildhame, you’re still there,” she said.
“Why yes, of course. That was the purpose of the demonstration with the pebble,” Jack answered. “I have not gone anywhere, I am merely invisible. If you would care to see a spell of teleportation demonstrated, I shall of course be glad to oblige.”
“Dear Dark Queen, yes,” Jaeren said aloud. “This I have to see.”
Jack gestured and released his spell, offering a gracious bow as he returned to visibility. He glanced around, and his eye fell on a workbench across the small plaza. “There,” he said. “I shall teleport myself to that small table. Please instruct your guards not to panic.”
“Of course,” Dresimil replied. “Continue when you are ready.”
With another small nod, Jack fixed his eye on the spot he wished to be. He considered simply teleporting himself as far from this place as he could, and taking his chances in the Underdark. Unfortunately, he was unarmed and completely unequipped for finding his way around in the darkness. If he fell into the dark elves’ hands again after an attempted escape, he had no doubt that he’d soon encounter the limits of their reasonableness, such as it was. No, better to convince the beautiful Lady Dresimil of his usefulness, then plot an escape later when he was better prepared. He reached again for the subtle energies of the Weave, whispering the words of his dimension-sliding enchantment. Once again the familiar energies of magic seemed strangely elusive, almost as if he were working through some sort of metaphysical fog. He pressed on anyway, redoubling his efforts.
“Now I am here,” he announced between the words of his casting. “And an instant later, I am-here!”
Nothing happened. Jack stood before the three dark elves, dumbfounded. He’d never botched a spell in that manner before, not one he knew so well. He offered an embarrassed grin, and quickly repeated the spell, only to fail again. He remained exactly where he was, an arm’s reach from the frozen form of Myrkyssa Jelan.
The dark elves shared predatory grins. “Perhaps you should give a little pirouette and announce that you are immaterial?” Jaeren asked. “Or you might make a whooshing sound as your proceed to your destination?”
“I was rather expecting him to run across the square and make a show of ‘appearing’ by the table,” Jezzryd remarked. “Standing there stupidly is much less entertaining.”
“We’re still waiting for you to magic yourself to your destination, Jack,” Dresimil said. “I must tell you, I shall be very disappointed if you have exaggerated your arcane talents.”
With a terrible sinking despair, Jack realized that not only had his teleportation failed-so, too, had his spell of invisibility. No wonder the drow had seemed so astonished. He’d been acting like an idiot, capering about under the mistaken belief that he was unseen. “I–I am certain that I will recall the proper forms of my spellcasting soon,” he stammered. “It must be some lingering effect of my encystment in the mythal stone. You will see, I am a very useful fellow-”
The three dark elves laughed aloud. “Pray, no more for now, Lord Wildhame,” Dresimil finally said. “So far you have been an amusing guest, but I must warn you against becoming tiresome. Should you recover your arcane powers-” the three dark elves shared another chuckle at that-“then perhaps we will find another way to put your talents to work.” She motioned to two of the guards standing nearby. “Varys, Sinafae, take our guest here down to Malmor. Tell him to provide Lord Wildhame with clothing and quarters suitable to his station, and introduce him to his duties.”
Jack started to protest, but checked himself. He wasn’t sure what Lady Dresimil would do if she decided that he was tiresome, but he suspected that he wouldn’t like it in the least. It was clear that his customary charm and talents were not as useful as he would have hoped in this dismal new age, however he had stumbled into it. Time to make the best of a poor hand. He drew himself up with all the dignity he could muster and bowed graciously. “I am at your disposal, my lady,” he said.
“Of
course you are, my dear Lord Jack,” the drow noblewoman replied. She watched with a bemused smile as the dark elf guards came up on either side and marched him away from the plaza.
A thousand questions hovered at the tip of Jack’s tongue as he slogged along between the guards, dejected. For the moment he shut them out of his mind and gazed at the curious scene around him. The exposed lake bed was still quite muddy in many places, and the dark elves’ laborers had laid down large planks of a curious gray wood over the worst patches of muck. Slimy walls outlined the shapes of ancient buildings surrounding the mythal stone’s plaza. Jack couldn’t imagine why anybody had built a city on the bottom of a lake, but then he realized that the lake’s level must have varied significantly over time. When he’d been here a hundred years ago (and that was a thought that made his knees go weak), the lake had clearly been much fuller. He didn’t remember seeing old buildings on the lake bed then, but perhaps they’d been buried in muck or simply hidden by the murky water. The ancient drow had built their city here when the shore was dry; the lake had flooded at some point afterward and remained that way through Jack’s first visit to the site; now the lake had fallen, revealing the old city again. Given the scale of the excavations and the miserable slaves toiling to clear away the muck, Jack decided the drow had drained the lake deliberately. But why would they care about old ruins?
“This all seems like a great deal of trouble,” he said to the guards escorting him, waving an arm to indicate the ruins. “If I may ask, what is the point of the work?”
The guards turned on him, eyes narrowed. One stepped forward and drew a long, supple baton from his belt in a single motion, flicking it across Jack’s upper arm with whiplike speed before Jack could even register that he was under attack. The sharp crack of the baton echoed in the damp air, and Jack buckled in pain. “Slaves do not speak unless spoken to,” the guard snarled. “Call any drow you must address master if you wish to keep your tongue in your head. Do you understand?”
“Damn it!” Jack wailed. “Was that necessary?”
The baton flicked again, and this time slashed him across his left knee. Jack crumpled to the ground. The baton was more than simple wood; it had a rasping, almost sticky feel to it, and a fierce burning sting began to rise up in the welt it left behind. “I said, do you understand?” the drow guard shouted.
“Yes,” Jack replied. Seeing the drow’s hand draw back for a third blow, Jack cringed. His arm and leg were afire where the stinging rod had touched him. “Yes, master! Yes, master. I understand!”
“Speak again before we get to the fields and we’ll beat you until you can’t walk,” the second guard said. “And if you can’t keep up with us, you’ll wish we’d killed you instead. Now get up, slave.”
Jack pushed himself to his feet, not daring to say another word. Dresimil and her brothers had struck him as reasonably well-mannered people, not remotely as bloodthirsty and barbaric as drow were reported to be. Granted, they’d taken a certain cruel pleasure in his unusual predicament, but he knew plenty of surface nobles who might have done the same. But now that Dresimil was done with him, he was just a slave … and evidently the drow weren’t in the habit of wasting courtesies on their chattel.
The guards escorting him set off again, and Jack hobbled after them, determined not to provide either with an excuse to strike him again. They passed out of the ruins into a belt of gigantic mushrooms the size of trees, into a forest of pale gray fungi on the floor of the vast cavern. A crew was at work sawing a fallen stalk into the slick gray planks he’d seen in the ruins-naturally, the drow wouldn’t have easy access to the trees of the surface world-but Jack carefully kept his questions to himself. The path led through the fungal grove to the gates of a great dark castle, which loomed over the cavern floor. Weird globes and twisting streamers of eldritch light danced along the ramparts and spires of the structure, which seemed to have been carved from a ring of enormous stalagmites. Here, before the gates of the castle, the guards turned onto a path leading to a stone-fenced paddock lying beneath the castle ramparts. Jack became aware of a heavy animal stink in the air, a charming combination of dank fur, dung, and crushed fungus.
They halted before a crude bunkhouse or shelter of stone, mud, and moss. “Malmor!” the guard who’d struck Jack called. “We’ve got a new dung-shoveler for you, Malmor.”
There was a thick, snuffling grunt, and then a huge, shaggy figure appeared in the shelter’s doorway. Its yellowed skin was covered in lank, reddish hair, and a vast belly sagged over its ill-fitting leather breaches. The creature-a bugbear, Jack thought, although he’d never seen one so fat-bobbed his head and grinned crookedly at the drow guards. “Good, good, masters. I have much work, much work. But I do not like the looks of this one, no, no. Too small, too small, too thin, I think. He seems a shirker to me, a shirker he seems.”
“That is hardly our concern now,” the second drow guard said.
The bugbear Malmor approached and poked Jack with one fat finger. “I will have to keep an eye on him all the time, all the time. Easier to kill him now.”
“If Matron Dresimil wanted him dead, she would have killed him herself,” the guard Varys replied. “If you have dung in need of shoveling, have him do it. Otherwise, work him as you see fit, but do not kill him.”
The bugbear flicked a spiteful look at Jack, but bowed and simpered to the dark elves. “Dung I have in plenty, masters, in plenty. It shall be as you say.”
“Good,” the dark elves said. They threw Jack to the ground at the bugbear’s feet, and marched away back to the castle.
Jack picked himself up and started to brush himself off, only to discover that he’d already encountered his first rothe patty. He grimaced in disgust, but Malmor only laughed. “Don’t trouble yourself, no, no,” the bugbear said. “By the end of the day you’ll wear it from head to toe no matter what you do. Now follow me if you want a shovel.”
Jack sighed, and followed the bugbear.
CHAPTER TWO
How long Jack Remained in the Rothe paddocks he couldn’t begin to guess. In the sunless gloom of the Underdark, there was no dawn to mark the start of a day or sunset to end one. Time simply passed in dull, shapeless hours of toil. Malmor worked him to exhaustion; he would collapse in some stinking corner of the mushroom-cluttered fields, sleeping fitfully until discovered and kicked awake. At long intervals, surely a full day of the surface world, other slaves were sent to the kitchens beneath the brooding drow tower to bring back pails of bland gray porridge to the paddocks. And then it was back to the never-ending work of tending the dark elves’ herds.
Jack soon learned to loathe the rothe, the dark elves’ cattle. They were shaggy, stinking subterranean musk-oxen that devoured huge amounts of fungi Jack never would have imagined to be edible by anything, and soon enough turned that fungi into equally huge amounts of foul droppings. The creatures were not as large as surface cattle, standing little higher than Jack’s breastbone, but they were solidly built; well-armed with sharp horns; and very, very strong. Worse yet, they were far less stupid than they appeared, and possessed an aggressive, sullen temperament. The first time his meager meal of porridge was brought to him in the fields, two of the creatures ran him off from his pail while a third, clearly the ringleader, knocked it over and lapped up Jack’s lunch.
Naturally, he bent his every effort to absenting himself from the situation as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the drow and their trustees were well aware that he might not voluntarily remain in their service, and supervised him with maddening thoroughness. Whenever Malmor wasn’t in sight, one of the lesser overseers working for him kept an eye on Jack: Two-Tusks the orc, a rabid gnoll called Karshk, the hateful dwarf Craven, or one of the other boss-slaves who watched over the captives working in the paddocks. Jack discovered that Malmor and his thugs had an uncanny gift for anticipating him; whenever slaves were sent to work in distant enclosures of the rothe paddocks where a captive might be tempted to make a run for it, the
overseers never failed to pull Jack out of the work party for duties close at hand. When field-slaves were sent to the castle to draw pails of porridge, Jack always seemed to be the last one to learn that food was available and consequently drew the meagerest portion. Soon enough Jack’s limbs trembled from weakness, and the aromas of dripping roasts and potato-filled stews came to haunt his dreams.
Jack had always imagined that a long period of forced servitude might offer a clever-witted and resolute fellow such as himself the opportunity to rise to his circumstances. His enemies might believe they had broken him, but still the fires of vengeance would smolder in his heart. In the most wretched of circumstances he would naturally find the keys to his eventual freedom: discarded tools that could be cunningly hoarded to improvise weapons or disguises, the slow establishment of camaraderie and trust with fellow-prisoners who could help him on his way, the inevitable appearance of patterns in the guards’ activities that he could exploit in a cunning plan. In the bards’ stories such things always came to wronged prisoners who persevered in their toil … but not to Jack. He was beaten severely whenever he touched anything that wasn’t a shovel. His fellow-prisoners (a motley assortment of orcs, wretched human or dwarf slaves, goblin rabble, and worse) hated him and clearly intended to murder him as soon as Malmor and the other overseers weren’t watching. And hunger and toil soon dulled his wits into something about as useful as the miserable gray slop he had to fight for at each meal.
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