by Tim Pratt
The third chamber was the one that made Zaltys turn her face resolutely forward, focused only on the hallway in front of her, all curiosity burned out of her. A derro in a blood-stained apron worked in that room, a pair of long metal tables set up in the center of his sovereign space. On one table lay the partially-dissected body of a beholder, perhaps the same one they’d seen captured in the square earlier, and the derro chirurgeon was snipping off its eyestalks with a pair of large shears. On the other table lay the body of a hairy humanoid figure-perhaps a quaggoth? — also partly taken to pieces. But the dead quaggoth had beholder eyestalks attached to its head, and the stalks were moving, waving lazily like underwater plants undulating in the current, and when one of the eyes looked at Zaltys as she passed, she could tell it was horribly aware.
Zaltys couldn’t imagine seeing anything more disturbing-until, abruptly, she did. Just be glad you didn’t see a human on the table, Zaltys thought. It could have been one of your kin. Unless they were all killed long ago.
The hallway finally ended in another doorway, and another stairway spiraling down. The savant seemed to notice Bug-eater for the first time. “Do you want to go down there too?”
Bug-eater shook his head firmly, bowed rather elaborately to Julen and Zaltys, and strolled away-not down the hallway, but into one of the open doors of the side rooms. Screams immediately emerged from the room, though whether they were Bug-eater’s screams or the screams of the sovereign derro inside or the screams of some other entity entirely, Zaltys didn’t know. The savant took no notice, leading them down the stairs.
“We could take her,” Julen whispered to her. “They never even bothered disarming us.”
Zaltys nodded. “I’m not sure killing her does us any good, though.”
“True. But I don’t mind telling you, Cousin, I’m pleased to have the option.”
The option didn’t last long. At the base of the stairs they found a solid wooden door reinforced with iron bars-the first closed door they’d seen in the Collegium-guarded by two hulking humanoids armed with short swords. It took Zaltys a moment to realize they were derro, since they were taller than she was and almost as broad across the shoulders as Krailash, but they had the spiky white derro hair and the long faces and pointed chins Zaltys had grown all too accustomed to seeing. The distinctive derro eyes were hidden by blindfolds made of strips of dark cloth. Zaltys wondered what they were-experimental subjects made more strong by the dark arts of derro chirurgeons? Merely derro heads attached to the bodies of larger humanoids? And why the blindfolds?
The last question was answered quickly. The savant drew a long needle from the sleeve of her robe. The eyes all over her garment stopped blinking, and stared at Zaltys and Julen fixedly. “Now then,” the savant said. “You’re almost ready to meet the Slime King. I just need to remove your eyes first.” She stepped toward them, needle glittering.
The grell philosopher was full to bursting from eating his dead, and he’d hidden away the bits of their flesh he couldn’t devour yet to keep them safe from other predators, but these two were too delicious to pass up. A scaly thing and a hairy thing, and he was under no orders from an interloper god or a mob of derro scum to give these two safe passage. (There were other things in the cavern, a snuffling thing of smoke and a small snake, but he was interested in the meatier specimens.) The scaly thing was big and strong and the hairy one was small and weak. Use the big one to kill the little one, for a start. That was elegant. The philosopher valued elegance.
This is no way to wield such a fine weapon, Krailash thought. The grell that possessed him forced him to lift the axe up over his head, which was entirely the wrong way to use such an axe-he was killing a person here, not splitting a length of wood for the fireplace. It was no surprise that a floating, tentacled brain would lack proper martial technique, but it was an additional dishonor to be used as a tool by something so incompetent. Not that his poor form would save Alaia’s life: she would be split by the axe, if not as neatly as a length of wood might have been.
The worst part was, Krailash couldn’t even close his eyes as his arms began to drive the axe down.
But his poor form provided enough warning for Alaia to react. She dived aside, and the blow fell half a foot from her, the blade of the axe ringing loudly on the hard stone floor. Krailash staggered with the swing, the weight of the axe pulling him off balance and making him fall to the floor. Alaia’s spirit companion rushed toward him, head lowered, snorting and pawing at the stone-but it didn’t attack, merely stood guard. Krailash’s body tried to stand, but the grell was a creature of many limbs and weightless flight, and seemed to have some difficulty maneuvering Krailash’s mere two arms and legs and his great weight.
Alaia, meanwhile, was scanning the cavern, and she said, “Ah ha,” quietly, looking up. Her spirit companion lifted its head too, and snorted mildly. Motes of white fire emerged from its nostrils, floating up, and a blazing light ignited near the upper reaches of the cavern. The burning grell lashed its tentacles wildly, then dropped with a heavy wet thud to the cavern floor. It writhed, and tried to crawl away, and Krailash heard a great, drawn-out screech-though he soon realized the scream was echoing only in his mind, not in his ears. He regained control of his limbs, and stood up, unsteadily, then prodded at the corpse of the burning grell with the handle of his axe. “Foul thing,” he said, spitting, as if he could spit out the flavor of the creature’s mind in his own. “Took control of me, used me the way I’d wield a sword, but less skillfully.”
“An aberration.” Alaia’s voice was thick with disgust. “Say what you will about the derro-they are horrible creatures, but they belong in this world. But things like that come from elsewhere, and their very existence poisons reality and sickens nature. They are a tumor in the body of the world, everything shamans and druids stand against. Just as cancer turns healthy flesh into sickness, so these aberrations seek to turn the natural world into a reflection of their own mad homeland.” She hugged herself. “And these caverns are full of such things, I’m sure. Would that we could burn them all.”
“We may have the chance to burn a few more,” Krailash said. “But we should keep looking for Zaltys, if we can.” He looked around. “Where is the snake?”
Alaia frowned. “It must have slithered away during the fight.”
Krailash swore. “Lost without a guide, then, if it even was a guide. Following it was something, at least, it gave us the illusion of progress. But now …”
“Don’t lose heart.” Alaia’s tone was more order than reassurance. “Zaltys is depending on us.”
He shook his head. “I’m merely assessing our situation. We-”
“Look.” Alaia pointed at the floor of the tunnel that intersected theirs up ahead. “On the ground. Is that a chalk mark?”
Krailash investigated, kneeling, and attempting to smudge the faintly glowing blue smear without success. “Magical chalk. Haven’t seen that in years-we used to mark our paths with it when we went on dungeon delves.” He glanced up and down the tunnel. “There’s another. In fact, there are marks in both directions. Did Julen have chalk like that?”
She shrugged, but when she spoke, her voice held a trace of excitement. “I don’t know, but it seems like something the Guardians might use, doesn’t it?”
“The snake may have taken us just far enough then,” Krailash said. “Which way do we go in the tunnel?”
The dire boar spirit companion went snuffling into the corridor in one direction, then came back and traveled down the other. When it returned, it stared at Alaia for a moment, and she nodded. “We go right, Krailash.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s the direction that moves down.”
“A sound basis for choice,” he said.
Chapter Eighteen
No,” Zaltys said. “We want to see the slime King, and we can’t very well see him if you take out our eyes.”
The savant bared her teeth. “No one sees the king while
the king is the king-only after, if we put the king on display in the Hall of Glorious Victories, if there’s anything left to display. You can pass on your so-very-important, so-very-secret message just fine with no eyes. It only hurts a moment.” While she spoke, the needle moved, weaving a glittering pattern before them.
Zaltys leveled her looted repeating crossbow at the savant’s belly. “We like our eyes. I like my eyes rather more than I like your life. Put the needle away, and let the Slime King know we’re here. We can talk to him while he hides behind a screen, or in a dark room-there are easier ways than putting our eyes out, you know.”
“Nothing easier. Poke, poke, poke, poke. And all done. Far easier than dousing torches or putting up a screen.”
“We could wear blindfolds, I suppose, like these guards do.”
The savant shook her head. “They wear cloth to cover their eyes, which have been poked out, and the cloth soaks up the oozing things that ooze out of the holes. Very basic, very traditional.” The savant seemed to take notice of her crossbow for the first time, and frowned. “They didn’t take your weapons away upstairs? Useless guards.”
Zaltys glanced at the derro by the door, but they might as well have been on another continent for all the attention they paid the exchange. “That surprised me too,” she said. “We don’t mean your Slime King any harm, but I’d think you’d worry more about assassins.”
The guards flanking the door began to chuckle, as if they shared one voice-or at least one sense of humor. “Ha,” the savant said, speaking the word rather than actually laughing. “If you lot can assassinate the Slime King, then our king deserves to be assassinated. The king can take care of himself.” She turned to the guards. “Tell the king there are visitors here, emissaries from the surface world, and that they don’t want to be blinded.”
One of the guards shrugged and knocked once on the door. A panel slid open in the door, and the guard murmured through the hole to another blindfolded face inside. Then the panel slid shut.
Zaltys wasn’t sure if she still needed to be aiming the crossbow at the savant. She still had her needle out. Julen had sauntered over a few feet and was standing in a casual-looking way, but Zaltys could tell by the way his feet were set that he was prepared to whip out his throwing knives and let loose if it appeared necessary.
The panel on the door slid open again. The guard inside murmured to a guard outside, and he took a step forward. “The Slime King will see you. And consents to be seen.”
“This is outrageous,” the savant said, froth forming at the corners of her mouth, her whole body vibrating-except for the long needle, which she held perfectly still and steady. “I’ve never been allowed to see the Slime King, and I’m the Minister of Seeing Things, I’ve never even gotten through the door, and now these humans from the surface world think they can-”
“The Slime King has spoken,” the guard said, and clouted the savant on the side of the head. The smaller derro dropped her needle and then followed it, falling to the floor. All the eyes on her robe closed too. Zaltys couldn’t tell if she was unconscious or dead. A thin trickle of blood ran from the fallen savant’s ear.
“Enter,” the guard said, and the door swung open.
Zaltys looked at Julen, who shrugged. They went through the doorway, followed by their little snake companion, into another huge chamber, one dominated by a giant, almost perfectly round pool of water. Torches on long poles around the pool made reflections on the water and filled the room with shadows. On the far side of the pool, looking quite incongruous in that vast open expanse of stone, were the furnishings of a house: a bed, a desk with a chair, a low couch, a long dining table, a wooden wardrobe, and other pieces of furniture. A humanoid figure sat at the desk, back to the door, head bent, apparently working.
“Go on, then,” said one of the two guards inside the door. “The king awaits.”
Zaltys and Julen stepped tentatively forward. The ceiling there was high, and every footstep on the neatly-swept stone floor rang and echoed. They skirted wide around the pool-Zaltys noted that it was easily large enough to hold an aboleth, and wondered if the Slime King lurked below. Perhaps the more human figure on the far side was merely a secretary or translator.
But nothing broke the surface of the pool, so they continued around it, to the little pocket of normality formed by the arrangement of tables and lamps and chairs. They went around to the other side of the desk, and faced the person working there.
It was a small human woman wearing a simple housedress, peering at a sheet of parchment with her nose very close to the paper. The woman was quite old, the dark skin of her hands thin and wrinkled, her hair as white as a derro’s but much more fine, pulled back in a bun on top of her head. After a moment she looked up from the paper. “Ah. The emissaries from the surface world. I’ve been following your progress. It’s remarkable you made it this-” She broke off abruptly and stared at Zaltys. “Extraordinary,” she murmured, and tilted her head, gazing at Zaltys’s face as if checking her own appearance in a mirror.
Zaltys wasn’t sure what to say. Of all the things she’d expected to find when she entered the chamber of the Slime King, a rather grandmotherly old woman was not one of them.
“Are you … the Slime King?” Julen said.
The woman glanced at him, inclined her head, then went back to staring at Zaltys.
“It’s only that … forgive me,” Julen stammered. “From the name, I supposed …”
With obvious effort, she tore her gaze from Zaltys and looked at Julen. “You expected something different. Fair enough. It’s just a title, really. I’m sure the original Slime King was both male and slimy, but not all of them have been. There was an aboleth once … and a mind flayer-that didn’t end well, he’s displayed upstairs. In fact, they both are. And for a while, I understand, the Slime King was actually just the corpse of a grell philosopher. That king is generally ranked as one of the four or five best in the clan’s history. He was supposed to have been very contemplative. Anyway, it hardly made anything worse. But I’ve been the Slime King for some time now.” She looked back at Zaltys. “Tell me, young lady. Where are you from?”
“Delzimmer.”
The Slime King shook her head. “Not originally. Not with that coloring. The Delzimmer folk are paler by far, and the shape of your face … Where do your people hail from?”
“That’s kind of why we’re here-” Julen began. “Silence, human,” the Slime King hissed. Then she looked back at Zaltys and said sweetly, “Do you know, dear? Where your people come from?”
“The jungle,” Zaltys said. “My village was taken by slavers when I was a baby. I was the only one left behind.”
The Slime King sat back in her chair and laced her hands across her stomach. “I thought so,” she said. “Your face-it looks almost like mine did, when I was your age. It’s lovely to see you, child. Family is so important.”
“What are you talking about?” Zaltys said.
“My name is Iraska,” the Slime King said. “And I’m either your great-great-grandmother or your great-great-aunt.” She smiled, showing her teeth for the first time, and her canines were long and curved, like the fangs of a serpent.
Things in camp were going badly. Having the big boss, her daughter, the head of security, and half a dozen of the most dedicated guards leave unexpectedly tended to lead to a certain amount of shirking, lollygagging, malingering, and-even for those who weren’t actively lazy-general confusion and delay.
Worst of all, Glory had to let people see her, and remember her, and try to convince them that she was, in fact, qualified to give them orders. The morning after everyone else went underground, she stood in the center of camp on an improvised platform made of stacked crates and cleared her throat. The workers having their breakfast didn’t pay her any mind, and she realized she was still-automatically-blurring herself out of their mental vision. So she’d made herself visible, startling a few people nearby, and cleared her throat again. “Hell
o. Everyone. My name is Glory. I’m, ah, part of the camp leadership. Alaia and Krailash are off on an important errand, so they’ve put me in charge, and-”
“We’ve never seen you before!” one of the cooks shouted, the outburst followed by general muttering, including some, unfortunately, from armed men eating their breakfasts alongside the laborers.
“I keep to myself,” Glory said. “But I’m here now, so if there are any problems, you can bring them to me. Otherwise things should just proceed as-”
“She’s a tiefling,” a guard said. “You can’t trust them. She’s practically a devil. Probably sent from some cult of Asmodeus out in the jungle to seduce us all to destruction.” He sounded somewhat hopeful on that last point, and Glory wished she’d worn something a little less revealing. She wasn’t used to worrying about that sort of thing. She could sense the mood of the crowd, and while they weren’t about to attack her with pikes and torches, they also weren’t taking her leadership seriously. Not that she wanted to be a leader anyway.
Then Quelamia mounted the platform next to her, resplendent in her gold and green robes, holding a staff of living wood, her otherworldly eyes seeming to look at every face in the crowd at once. “You all know me,” she said, her voice loud and clear and carrying, though she didn’t particularly seem to be raising her voice. “I am the senior wizard of the Traveling Serrats, and I have sheltered you from storms, slain your enemies, and punished your transgressions, as your leader Alaia variously willed. I say to you now: this tiefling has been granted the authority to rule the caravan during Alaia’s absence. Her voice is the voice of the family, and to disobey her is to disobey the family, with all the dire consequences that implies. Do you all understand?”
