by Tim Pratt
“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,” Krailash 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?”
&
nbsp; “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. She 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.
The earth on either side of the temple moved together as if pushed by great unseen hands, huge humps of dirt and rock and broken bits of city piling up and sliding sideways and filling the shallow indentation where the temple had been. Quelamia plucked her staff from the ground and strode around the temple site, dragging her staff’s base in the dirt and scoring a line of charred rock that circled the area entirely. Once the circle was closed, she nodded. “There. Nothing will come out of that hole again. Of course, there are other openings-the Underdark has a thousand mouths, all hungry-but I doubt there are any so large, or so close to us. I worry less about lone monsters wriggling through cracks in the rock. That hole was large enough to let through a legion of duergar or drow.”
“And to take down an entire village.”
“Mmm,” Quelamia said. “Yes. You said they raided a human settlement?”
Krailash nodded. “Only the girl child was left behind.”
“Interesting. There are yuan-ti nearby-I can sense them, or at least the old and ravenous things they keep in the pits below their ruined settlements-but I’m surprised to hear there were humans.”
Krailash shrugged. “You know humans. They settle everywhere, even places more sensible races know to avoid.”
The eladrin nodded. “That they do. And yet here we are, following a human into just such a place. What does that say about us?”
“It says that even sensible races have to make a living,” Krailash said, and the eladrin gave him one of her rare and fleeting smiles.
Chapter Four
The shaman’s spirit companion, a dire boar the particular color of the underside of a threatening storm cloud, nosed its way silently through the undergrowth, nose snuffling, obviously searching for something.
“Up here,” Zaltys said, and loosed an arrow.
The shaft of the arrow stuck in the soft jungle ground a foot away from the boar. The feathered fletching of the arrow, taken from a colorful jungle bird, stuck up jauntily.
The spirit boar groaned in a weary, put-upon way, and stepped closer to the base of the tree where Zaltys was perched. The boar jerked its head back, toward the direction of camp, its intent clear: follow me.
“What does mother want now?” Zaltys nocked another arrow. It was surprisingly difficult to shoot straight down with any accuracy, but she’d been practicing, and the next shot speared a wriggling blue-and-red serpent as it slithered past, pinning its head to the earth.
The pig snorted, scratched at the earth-leaving long furrows in the dirt, because the spirit companion was only insubstantial when its mistress Alaia wanted it to be-and gesturing again with its head.
“This is supposed to be my free time,” Zaltys grumbled. She unstrung her bow and clambered down from the branches of the vine-encrusted tree, dropping to the ground and bending to retrieve her arrows. She was aware, intellectually, that her family was so wealthy that she could fire arrows into the air for a year without stopping and never put a noticeable dent in the annual ammunition budget, but in practice, she could no more leave a good arrow lying on the ground than she could go a tenday without sleeping. Besides, she was a member of the Travelers, that branch of the Serrat family that actually went out into the world every year. They weren’t wasteful and decadent like the year-round city dwellers who made up the Trading Serrats, or focused solely on results without consideration for expenditures like the spies and enforcers of the Guardian Serrats (whom most of the family secretly called the Cutthroat Serrats, though they only cut the throats of those who threatened the family. Or might threaten it someday. Or who got in the way of the natural flow of commerce). The Travelers spent months in the field, ensuring the continued health and wealth of the family’s core business in the most direct way, and they had to be smarter, thriftier, more efficient, and more responsible than the rest of the family.
Or so her mother had taught her, and after sixteen years as the heir apparent of the Traveling branch of the family, Zaltys had learned her lessons well. “Lead on, pigmother,” she said, and Alaia’s spirit companion set off toward the camp. Zaltys looked around the jungle as she walked, but she didn’t see any bodyguards lurking in the bushes. That either meant she’d finally convinced Krailash she didn’t need protecting, or he’d assigned bodyguards who were better than usual at being stealthy. Probably the latter.
They were almost two tendays from the city, just on the outskirts of the jungle, and camped a good distance from the haunted city of Ammathtar, so the only threats were occasional jungle beasts. The defenses around the camp weren’t as elaborate as they would eventually become, for there was
just one outer ring of supply and transport carts, surrounding an inner ring where the more high-ranking principals of the camp lived. The laborers were left to pitch their own tents, entirely too close to the animal pens for olfactory comfort, Zaltys thought. She went past the elaborate treehouse on wheels-grown, rather than carved-that was the wizard Quelamia’s home, pausing to knock the living trunk with her knuckles for luck. She squinted at the squat black carriage where the psion Glory lurked when she wasn’t needed, which was most of the time. The majority of other inhabitants of the caravan couldn’t see Glory’s wagon-or Glory herself-at all, or, more accurately, forgot what they’d seen immediately afterward, but Zaltys was one of the few Glory was forbidden to mentally handicap, since she needed to understand all the workings of the caravan in order to take over its operations someday. Zaltys slapped the windchimes hanging by Glory’s door, setting up a clattering-the chimes were bone, not metal, carved in patterns that became more disturbing the longer you looked. Glory’s door opened, and the tiefling peered out suspiciously, then sighed when she saw Zaltys. “I thought you were playing in the woods all afternoon,” she said.
