Skein of Shadows

by Rockwell, Marsheila

  “Olladra’s luck, Marshal,” he said.

  “To you, as well,” she replied. “Take care of my people.”

  “I will.”

  She shook Laven’s hand next.

  “Stay safe, Vadalis.”

  “Cleave some skulls, Deneith.”

  She grinned.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  After Olog led his group, limping and lorn, back up the tunnel and out of sight, Sabira turned to what remained of her own small group.

  Greddark, Skraad, and Zi appeared basically unharmed, though a few small blisters had appeared on the wizard’s scalp. Rahm’s color was returning and he looked more alert. Xujil was unruffled as always. But Jester hung back, and though his face could bear no expression, he looked positively despondent.

  She walked back to where he stood, staring down at something in his hands. As she neared, she could see it was the mangled remains of his lyre.

  She stopped next to him and he looked up, his rubylike eyes glowing dully.

  “She was destroyed in the chitines’ attack. She bravely took the brunt of a blow that would have disabled me.” He made it sound as if one of their companions had stepped between him and a strike at his heart, sacrificing herself to save him. Sabira supposed she shouldn’t be surprised—he was a bard talking about his instrument, after all.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, trying hard to be, and failing miserably. It was a mindset she couldn’t really comprehend. A lyre could be replaced; the same couldn’t be said for the men who’d died today. Even if some of them had been trying to kill her.

  Though come to think of it, she did feel worse about the lyre’s destruction than about Thecla’s death. And she could think of several people whose unfortunate demises would upset her less than, say, scratching the cheek of her shard axe would. So maybe she understood the warforged bard better than she thought.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “What good am I without her? If I can’t play, I might as well return to the Canniths and become the war machine they want me to be.”

  “Well,” Sabira began slowly, “you’re welcome to do that, of course, and no one will think any less of you if you do. But consider this—is your goal to play the songs of others, or to play your own? Because the only way to write those songs is to live the stories in them. You can do that if you stay here. I’m not so sure the same can be said about returning to House Cannith.”

  Jester looked as if he might be considering her words. It was so hard to tell with warforged.

  “But … she can’t be fixed.”

  “Maybe not, but would she want you to stop playing because of that?”

  Sabira was starting to feel a little foolish, talking about the lyre as if it were the bard’s lover. But she’d lost three good swords in a little over a week; if she had to coddle the warforged to keep that from becoming four, then so be it. It wasn’t as if she’d never looked the fool before, and for less cause.

  “No,” he said softly, the red crystals of his eyes brightening. Then louder, more resolutely, “No, she wouldn’t. She’d want me to go on, to honor her memory by living those stories and writing those songs, just as you said.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m in, Marshal, till the climactic battle and the convenient epilogue! I’m your bard.”

  Sabira’s smile was a little strained, but she doubted the warforged noticed, busy as he was composing “The Ballad of the Marshal and the Martyred Lyre” in his head.

  “Glad to hear it,” she said, turning to move back to the front of the group. Jester’s hand caught her on the shoulder before she could go. She looked back at him questioningly.

  “Thank you, Marshal,” he said quietly, his voice earnest.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied, uncomfortable with his gratitude and what she’d done to earn it.

  Back at the front, she fell in beside Greddark and motioned for Xujil to head out. Zi and Rahm took up positions behind them, and Skraad and the bard brought up the rear.

  “Touching performance,” the dwarf said under his breath, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. “I almost believed you cared. Maybe you should think about taking up the lyre yourself. You certainly have a talent for telling stories.” Sabira thought she detected a slight emphasis on the word lyre.

  “Stuff it,” she hissed back angrily. But as she walked down the dark tunnel, she wasn’t sure who her ire was really directed at. The dwarf was the easy target—he’d called her on her manipulation of the naive warforged. But she was the one who, despite her own distaste for being used as a pawn, hadn’t hesitated to do it to someone else.

  Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK

  Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.

  The next week and a half passed in a blur of shadows, sameness, and growing paranoia. The pervasive gloom coupled with tricks of light and sound had everyone on edge. The strange forces at work here in the depths—the ones, Xujil placidly informed them, that also made teleportation back to the surface an iffy proposition—manifested in new and fun ways at every turn. Pockets of magical darkness made both the everbright lamps on their helmets and their low-light goggles temporarily useless. Even when they could see, they couldn’t trust what their eyes told them. Sabira kept glimpsing movement out of the corner of her eye, multi-legged black shapes skittering across wall and ceiling. Once she even thought she saw something that looked like a cross between a lizard and a spider watching her from the shadows, but of course when she blinked, nothing was there.

  Echoes sounded where nothing was there to make them, or returned to the group tenfold and distorted beyond recognition. The bland rations and water alternately took on the rancid taste of foul mud, or the coppery tang of blood. Some of the group had had hallucinations wherein the features of the person walking next to them had stretched and morphed into something evil and alien. Rahm had almost skewered Zi the first time it happened, and now none of them could stand to look any of their companions in the face, for fear of what they might see there.

  The only ones who seemed to be immune were Xujil and Jester. The drow was a creature of Khyber, so it was understandable that its madness would not faze him, but Sabira was surprised at the warforged’s resistance. Was it something in the air, or the water, neither of which he needed to survive here? Or did it have something to do with him being a construct, and the pathways to his fabricated brain just different enough to remain unaffected by the phenomena the rest of them were experiencing?

  Whatever the source of his apparent immunity was, Sabira wished she shared it. The nightmares were becoming both more intense and more frequent, and they were beginning to plague her waking hours now in addition to the few moments of sleep exhaustion forced upon her.

  Greddark’s face had become Orin’s, burning and melting as his legs had done beneath Frostmantle, leaving nothing but a grinning, accusing skull. Rahm had become Elix, leaning in for a kiss, only to have a tentacle covered with staring eyes snake out of his mouth, hungrily seeking hers. In reality, the chainmail-clad man had simply leaned toward her at a rest break, asking her to pass over a canteen of water.

  It got so bad that Sabira actually welcomed the few encounters they had with denizens of the deep. As soon as either Jester or Xujil confirmed that the threat was real, she was the first one in, wielding her urgrosh with abandon. Though the cave spiders and blood oozes—nightmares she had some hope of destroying—were a poor substitute for those she couldn’t.

  She found herself constantly fingering the half of Tilde’s medallion she carried in her pocket. Elix had given it to her before she’d left Vulyar. She didn’t ask how he’d acquired it, but she knew his father would have been loath to part with it. He told her it was for luck, but she knew him better than that. He was afraid that if Tilde was still alive when they found her, she might not be in her right mind. He knew that while the sorceress might not recognize Sabira as a friend, she would almost certainly remember Ned’s necklace. Elix hoped that would be enough to keep her from killing
Sabira outright.

  Having seen what the sorceress could do, especially when she was angry, Sabira hoped so too.

  The tunnel they’d been traveling through had been getting narrower and shorter for some time, and while some of the passageways they’d been in had clearly seen other feet, this one looked relatively untouched, at least by any of Tarath Marad’s new explorers. Its inhabitants were, of course, another story.

  Xujil made his way back to them.

  “The tunnel ahead is blocked by an ancient deadfall, but a small opening exists. We will have to crawl for some distance, but we will be able to pass through unharmed.”

  Greddark frowned, peering over the drow’s shoulder in the gloom. None of the luminous fungus grew here, and even the everbright lanterns were starting to wane.

  “Can’t we just clear it?”

  Sabira couldn’t blame him for asking. Despite their love of mining and being underground, many dwarves had a paradoxical fear of tight, enclosed spaces. Sabira didn’t much care for them herself.

  “Perhaps with the proper equipment, a dozen duergars on a leash, and the luxury of time, yes.” Xujil blinked at him. “But as we do not seem to have any of those things to hand, I believe crawling is our best course of action.”

  Sabira held up her hand to forestall Greddark’s retort.

  “I’ll let the others know.”

  She passed the information down the line, then gestured for Xujil to lead the way. As they followed the drow, Greddark caught her sleeve.

  “A dozen duergars on a leash?” he repeated in a low voice.

  Sabira didn’t miss a beat.

  “Can you think of a better place for them?”

  She didn’t wait to hear his answer, instead following the drow as he climbed quickly up a pile of broken rock to a small aperture and, crouching down, disappeared into it. Eyeing the sharp rubble, she shrugged her pack off and dug in it for a moment, coming up with a pair of leather gloves. Slipping them on, she replaced her pack and began the precarious ascent, careful to test each hand- and foothold before putting her full weight down. The guide had made the climb look easy, but she was no elf, and this was going to be challenging enough without having her palms cut to ribbons in the process.

  At the top of the stone pile, she glanced back to see the others following her lead, digging their own gloves out before coming up after her. Then she turned back to the dark opening and, with a quick prayer to the sun goddess Dol Arrah to light her way, she bent down and crawled inside.

  The everbright lantern on her helmet threw the rocky passage into sharp relief, painting the low roof and narrow walls with harsh blue and black angles. As she made her painstaking way across the shattered stone, she peered forward for any sign of Xujil, but she could see nothing ahead of her but darkness.

  Sabira’s world soon compressed into the small island of light cast by her helmet’s lamp. The walls were so close now that all she could hear was her own labored breathing and the scrabble of her hands and knees against jagged, unforgiving rock. Stinging sweat trickled down her forehead and into her eyes, blurring her vision. She could feel the tons of earth above her pressing down, eager to crush her for her temerity in daring to traverse the depths. She crept slowly along, becoming convinced with every passing moment that the drow had led them into a trap and that the tunnel would never end. That it had somehow closed up behind her, cutting her off from her companions, and that she had no choice but to crawl eternally forward until she ran out of food and water and the everbright lantern gave out, leaving her to die alone in unending darkness.

  As if in response to her fearful thoughts, the lamp flared and then went black. Sabira froze in place for long moments, her heart in her throat. But then the more rational part of her mind broke through the sudden, foreign terror, telling her she’d just entered another region of magical darkness. All she had to do was keep moving and she’d soon be out of it. The everbright lantern would work again and she’d find her way out of this tunnel and into … well, another tunnel, but at least it would be bigger and less oppressive.

  She allowed the calm, logical thoughts to wash over her, repeating them to herself until her breathing was even and she could move forward again, no longer paralyzed by fear.

  She made it about a foot and a half before she heard a low, hungry whisper, right beside her, where no one could possibly be.

  Saaaabaaaa.…

  With a yelp she couldn’t contain, Sabira scrambled forward, blind. She felt the sharp rocks slicing through clothing and flesh, but barreled on, heedless. She slammed against the wall as the tunnel made an abrupt turn to her right, and then she was out of it, tumbling down a steep slope and landing on her back in warm, sticky mud.

  Xujil stood above her, his head cocked to one side as he looked at her curiously. Then he held out an ebon-skinned hand to her.

  She took it without thinking, so grateful to be out of the crawlway and back into what passed for the open down here that she didn’t even mind his clammy grasp as he pulled her up from the sucking mire.

  “Are you well, Marshal?” he asked.

  She took quick stock of her injuries and nodded. The cuts and bruises were nothing compared to the blow to her pride. In all her years as soldier, with all the horrors she’d faced, she had never felt as terrified as she had in that moment, trapped in that tunnel with something unseen as it whispered her name.

  Rationally, she knew the fear had been Khyber-wrought, and not her own—or, at least, not entirely. But that knowledge did nothing to lessen her shame. She was just glad none of the others besides Xujil had been there to see it.

  Once on her feet, she turned to survey her surroundings. She stood at the base of a curving cavern wall that stretched up into the darkness high above her and off into the distance on either side. The chamber was easily three times the size of the one that housed Trent’s Well; the largest that she had ever seen. Multicolored fungi glowed on the rocks, lighting up the vast cave with muted hues of violet, gold, emerald, and ruby.

  She’d landed in a subterranean swamp, fed by an unseen water source. Thick, ropy grasses grew at its edges. Beyond it, wide-boled gray trees thrust up out of the rocks, towering over the bizarre landscape as their full, domelike canopies scraped against the sparkling stalactites that dripped down from the unseen ceiling. It took Sabira a moment to realize that the strange forest was actually composed not of trees, but of gargantuan mushrooms.

  There was a sound behind her and Sabira looked to see Greddark emerging from the high tunnel and making his way carefully down the rocky slope. She searched his face carefully, but saw no trace of the terror she’d felt. Apparently, the dwarf had not heard his name called in the darkness as she had. She tried to ignore the disquiet that followed on the heels of that thought, but was not entirely successful.

  The others exited from the tunnel one by one and soon they were all gathered beside the swamp.

  “What is this place?” Jester asked, his voice full of wonder. Though she knew it was inaccurate, she could easily imagine tiny gears whirring in his head as he struggled to find a rhyme for “fungus.”

  “Gharad’zul,” Xujil supplied, “the Forest of Decay.”

  “Lovely,” Sabira said. “How fast can you get us through it?” She didn’t even like mushrooms in her food; she certainly didn’t relish the prospect of traipsing around the gigantic fungi like tiny garden bugs begging to be squashed.

  “As fast as your people can move,” the drow replied, and Sabira thought she detected a hint of alacrity in his voice. Considering the guide could travel much faster through his native environs without them, she supposed it was warranted. That didn’t make it any less annoying.

  “Well, let’s put word to deed and see, then, shall we?”

  The drow nodded and headed off at a brisk pace, skirting the swampy area. Bubbles rose from the surface, trailing them as they walked, but nothing emerged to confront them. Xujil led them under the forest canopy, which was really a seri
es of overlapping mushroom caps with gills the size of the mainmast on a House Lyrandar galleon. Smaller mushrooms the height of a man grew about the trunks of the fungal trees and more of the variegated luminous fungus carpeted the forest floor like moss. Fluffy spores floated in the air, disturbed by their passing, and Sabira didn’t have to tell the others to cover their noses and mouths to keep from inhaling them. Who knew what the tiny things might begin to grow once inside a humanoid host? Sabira suppressed a shudder just thinking about it.

  The forest was eerily quiet. No birds trilled in the nonexistent branches and no animals scampered through the absent underbrush. Even their footsteps were muffled, sloughing through wet fungus instead of crunching over pine needles or twigs. The air was stagnant and smelled of sweet rot and old dirt. Sabira found herself picking up her pace almost unconsciously, and the others followed suit, casting wary glances about them as they hastened through the alien woods.

  Before long, she began to hear a soft, rhythmic sound. It started so gradually that she didn’t mark it at first, but when she found herself swallowing several times to moisten a suddenly dry palate, she realized what it must be.

  “Are those … waves?”

  Just as she asked, they broke free of the woods and found themselves standing on the rocky shores of a vast lake that stretched out into darkness. Black water lapped sluggishly at the jagged beach, driven by some unseen force out upon its impenetrable surface.

  Xujil had mentioned traversing a body of water with Tilde’s group, but he hadn’t quite conveyed the size of said body. Sabira had been expecting a river like the one in Trent’s Well, or, at most, a pond. Nothing like this.

  Sabira scanned the shoreline, looking for a way across and coming up empty. It was a dead end.

  She rounded on their guide, suspicion flaring.

  “You were supposed to lead us to Tilde. Unless the city she’s being held in is underwater, you’ve got some explaining to do.” She reached back to unharness her urgrosh. “Now.”

  “It is well you reach for your axe, Marshal,” Xujil replied. “You will need it.”