Skein of Shadows

by Rockwell, Marsheila

  Was the drow actually threatening her?

  He continued on, unperturbed by either her anger or the shard axe now in her grasp.

  “There is a reason this path has remained untrodden by the surface-dwellers, save the sorceress and her men. They do not know the secret of crossing the sunless seas.” He paused, finally seeming to understand that he was in danger. “I do.”

  Sabira lowered her weapon slightly, eyes narrowing.

  “Continue.”

  Xujil pointed behind her.

  “That is how we cross.”

  Turning, it took her a moment to see what he meant. A stand of mushrooms as tall as the mayor’s house sprouted from a nearby inlet. Two of the mushrooms lay on their sides, felled not by rot, but by blades. Their enormous caps were missing.

  When she turned back to him, the drow’s smile hinted at smugness.

  “We sail.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Far, Barrakas 27, 998 YK

  Tarath Marad, Xen’drik.

  They set to work hacking at the stem of another of the giant mushrooms, Sabira with her urgrosh and the others with small hand axes from their packs. Xujil, as usual, stood aloof. Zi watched from afar as well, his strength not lying in his woodcutting skills.

  The mushroom’s stem was thick and rubbery, and even the adamantine blade of Sabira’s shard axe had some difficulty chopping through the odd pseudoflesh. The more mundane axes had even greater trouble, and it took the five of them working in concert to bring the towering fungus down. The sound of their blades hacking into the tough stem echoed off the cavern walls, and when the fungal tree fell, the noise ricocheted back at them like a distant avalanche.

  “Well, that’s going to attract some attention,” Sabira commented as she and the others moved toward the cap to begin detaching it and hollowing it out. Skraad, who’d been doing double duty with an axe in both hands, hung back for a moment, catching his breath.

  “Oh, no, I’m sure this cavern is ‘vacant,’ just like the last one was,” Greddark replied acerbically, casting a dark look over at the drow as they quickly severed the cap and began removing the planklike gills. The dwarf, not the most trusting of souls by nature, had become downright hostile toward Xujil ever since the guide had pulled his disappearing act back in the chitines’ cavern. In the Holds, the words “coward” and “welcher” were synonymous, and there was no more vile insult. The drow was lucky Greddark hadn’t already gutted him, just on principle.

  “Technically, the cave was vacant when we entered. The chitines were likely attracted by the sound of our battle with Thecla’s men,” Jester offered from the other side of the felled trunk. Unlike the others, his voice betrayed no sign of strain, and no sweat touched his metal brow. Sabira wished, not for the first time, that Guisarme was still with them. She wondered if he’d made it back to Stormreach, and if so, if the artificers there had been able to repair him.

  “Whose side are you on?” the dwarf growled, but Sabira ignored him, her mind elsewhere. Thoughts of the fallen warforged led inevitably to Laven and Glynn. Two more wounded under her command.

  Wounded, but still alive, she reminded herself. According to Xujil, she was doing better than Tilde had at this point, and with fewer resources from the outset. Sabira supposed she should take some sort of pride in that fact, but such self-congratulation rang hollow and false. She couldn’t help feeling that if she’d been a better leader, her three missing companions would still be with them.

  Then again, remembering the horrors of the past week, and the voice in the crawlway, they were probably better off where they were.

  “Keep an eye out for—” she began, turning to speak to Zi. As she did, there was a whoosh as something hot blasted past her, followed by a scream that did not stop.

  Whirling, she saw Skraad, his body engulfed in eldritch fire. Behind him, two man-sized mushrooms advanced on fleshy, leglike stalks, tiny eyes glowing within the round caps that served as their heads. Huge, bulbous arms sheathed in what looked like spine-covered greaves slammed down on him from either side, stabbing into the burning orc as he struggled frantically to put out the licking flames.

  She looked back over at Zi, wondering how the wizard could have missed the mark so badly, only to see the bald man in the grip of another walking mushroom, this one with long, tentacle-like arms that were wrapped around his throat, squeezing. The wizard’s mouth worked soundlessly as he clawed at his neck, trying to free himself long enough to speak another spell. As Sabira watched, another shambling fungus stepped forward, driving a spiny staff into Zi’s gut, and pulling it away bloody.

  “Myconids!” Xujil shouted. “Get the boat into the water! They cannot follow us there!”

  The drow ran lightly along the shore to the severed cap and began pulling it out toward the lake, Jester and Rahm joining him. Sabira and Greddark turned to face the forest, which was now alive with movement as dozens of the walking mushrooms marched inexorably toward them.

  “Use your wand!” she said to the dwarf, holding her shard axe in front of her as she backed slowly toward the water’s edge. More and more of the myconids swarmed out of Gharad’zul until she was sure the entire fungal forest had uprooted itself and was advancing toward them.

  “Can’t. Used up all the acid. Look like they’re impervious to fire, anyway—or just willing to ignore it,” he replied, not bothering to prime his alchemist’s blade as he unsheathed it. He’d shoved the handle of the small axe through his belt and now held his sword out before him in a double-fisted grip.

  Sabira’s eyes moved past him to where Skraad fought futilely against a half dozen of the creatures as they rained blow after blow down upon him, seemingly unfazed by the flames. Sabira wanted to run to his aid, but she knew it was already too late as the orc fell beneath the onslaught and disappeared from sight.

  A commotion sounded behind her and Sabira glanced back, dreading what she would see. An enormous round spore had floated over the water toward Xujil and the others as they dragged the makeshift boat into the lake. Rahm must have seen it first, for he’d moved to engage, drawing the pseudopod-covered sphere away from the drow and the warforged and thrusting at it with his sword. As he did so, the sphere erupted, showering him with what looked like green dust. She could only watch helplessly as the man began to scream and choke, the flesh around his nose and mouth bubbling as he inhaled the poisonous spores. He threw himself into the water, flailing about, trying to wash the toxins away. Too soon, the thrashing quieted and Rahm lay still, the back of his head bobbing up and down in the oblivious waves.

  “Sabira! Move!”

  She tore her eyes away from Rahm’s lifeless figure, shaken out of her horrified reverie by the urgency in Greddark’s voice. The boat was in the water and the myconids were mere feet away, reaching for them with spine-covered arms and rootlike tentacles.

  She didn’t need any further urging. She turned and ran.

  Sabira reached the boat first, splashing through knee-deep water and clambering aboard, aided by Xujil and Jester. Greddark was right behind her, and as soon as they were both safely inside, Xujil handed them sections of gill, which were thick and hard like wood.

  “Row.”

  They got about a hundred feet from the shore, which was lined now with the myconids, their caps forming an irregular and menacing horizon against the incongruously cheerful light of the luminescent fungus.

  “No. Stop.”

  Xujil looked over at the dwarf questioningly.

  “They will have more of the gas spores. The water is no barrier to them, unless we are farther out.”

  Greddark whirled, causing the boat to rock unsteadily. His brown eyes blazed with barely suppressed fury.

  “You are about two very short breaths from being thrown overboard, so my recommendation would be for you to stop speaking while you still can. Bad enough you lead us into a virtual ambush with those—what do you call them? Chitines? Then you bring us into a forest of living mushrooms and don�
��t bother to tell us that they might not take kindly to us chopping down one of their big brothers. And all the while, you manage to avoid getting a scratch on you while friend after friend of mine falls. So you’ll pardon me if I’ve decided I’m done taking orders from a coward.”

  Xujil blinked at him.

  “The warforged was correct; the chitine cavern was empty when I reconnoitered it. And the myconids are normally content to stay rooted in place. They did not attack Donathilde and her men; I had no reason to believe they would attack you. But if you are implying that I want you dead, I could have accomplished that feat at any time, while you slept,” the drow said bluntly. “What reason would I have had for bringing you all the way down to the Deeps, when I could easily have slit your throats in the Shallows, if that had been my intent?”

  “Well, considering you like to keep duergars as slaves and murder infants, who knows? Maybe it’s what passes for fun down here.”

  “Ah,” Xujil said, nodding. “So that is the crux of your dislike. The child.”

  “It’s definitely not a mark in your favor.”

  “We have been at war with the Spinner of Shadows since before you of the surface began manifesting the mark of the dragons. Before that, we were enslaved by the giants and suffered their enduring cruelties. Our enemies are implacable and unrelenting, and always have been. They would not hesitate to exterminate us, given the chance, so we cannot hesitate either. The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy.”

  “But the people of Trent’s Well weren’t your enemies,” Sabira said, disturbed to find herself unable to fault the drow’s cold logic.

  “A fact we did not discover until it was too late.” He looked at her, and shrugged helplessly. “Our magic may be different from yours, Marshal, but not even we can change the past.”

  Greddark scoffed.

  “I can’t believe you’re buying that,” he said to her in disgust. Looking at Xujil, he narrowed his eyes. “Just stay away from me, drow, or you’ll find out that no one does ‘implacable and unrelenting’ better than a dwarf. Now stop rowing.”

  Shrugging again, the guide obeyed. Greddark rummaged around in the packs at the bottom of the mushroom boat until he came up with a light crossbow and a clip that held five bolts. Setting them aside, he dug in his pouches until he came up with the vial of sulfur he’d scraped from the canyon walls at Zawabi’s Refuge, and another half-filled with a thick red liquid. He unstoppered both vials and carefully shook half of the yellow powder into the liquid, which Sabira guessed was some sort of oil. Then he replaced the corks in both, secreted the sulfur back in his pouch, and shook the remaining tube vigorously until the powder had completely dissolved, turning the liquid a rich carnelian color. Then he unstoppered it again, poured the concoction over the heads of the five quarrels, and loaded the clip into the crossbow.

  “What are you doing? What good are five crossbow bolts against a few hundred of those?” Sabira asked, jerking her head toward the shore.

  “Sulfur,” the artificer replied, picking up the crossbow and sighting it carefully, “mixed with certain types of oil, creates a potent fungicide.” Then before she could respond, he pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession. “For Skraad. And Rahm. And Zi.”

  The bolts flew across the water, thunking into the pseudoflesh of three of the largest myconids.

  “Sovereigns,” Xujil murmured, and by his tone of grudging admiration, Sabira knew he wasn’t calling out to the Host. “They lead the colony. If they fall, it falls with them.”

  “Good,” Greddark said, firing twice more, this time at two gas spores that hovered over the edge of the water. As the quarrels struck home, the spheres exploded, showering their fellow fungi with the dwarf’s creation. “Might take a few days, but by the time we get back here, we shouldn’t have to deal with them again.”

  “What have you done?” Jester asked in a shocked voice, the first time he’d spoken since they left land.

  “What I had to,” the dwarf replied shortly, attaching the crossbow to his belt, opposite his sheathed alchemy blade.

  “But … to destroy the whole colony …?”

  Greddark looked up.

  “They’re not people, they’re fungus. And even if they were, like your drow friend here said, ‘The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy,’ ” he said, and Sabira wondered if he realized that he hadn’t just repeated Xujil’s words, he’d mimicked both the guide’s tone and inflection perfectly.

  They rowed in silence after that, paddling far out onto the lake until they could no longer see Gharad’zul behind them and there was nothing but cold, black water around them on every side. Sabira lost her bearings quickly, but neither Xujil nor Greddark seemed concerned. She decided it must be living underground that gave the two races their innate sense of direction. Apparently, it wasn’t just a dwarf thing. It was also a drow thing. Or at least an Umbragen one.

  She almost chuckled at that, but quickly recognized the humor for what it was—an inappropriate but understandable reaction to the sudden deaths of so many of her companions.

  She’d lost comrades-at-arms before; you couldn’t have lived through the end of the Last War without seeing someone you cared about die. She’d even lost more than three on one mission—or even six, if you counted Laven, Glynn, and Guisarme. But the difference was that then, she’d at least been able to strike a blow against the ones who’d killed her friends. This time, she hadn’t even had a chance to fight back. And, of course, before, those men hadn’t been under her command.

  These had.

  She had to remind herself, again, that she’d forced no one to join her on this mission. They’d come of their own accord, judging the rewards to be worth the risks. And if they’d gotten far more of the latter than the former, that was not her doing.

  None of which, however true, gave her even the slightest bit of comfort.

  She found herself wishing suddenly that Elix were here. As a captain of the Sentinel Marshals, he’d had to deal with losing men, even with ordering them to their deaths. It was something every Deneith soldier trained for, but that few ever had to actually face. She knew Elix wouldn’t be able to make the pain or the guilt go away—that was her burden, the price of command. But he’d at least be able to show her how not to hate herself for it.

  And as she thought it, she wondered if that’s why she’d balked at the idea of marrying him. Not because she wasn’t good enough for him—no one was, and besides, who in love ever truly thought they were worthy of that love being returned by the object of their affection? No one who actually was, surely.

  No, that beautiful betrothal bracelet and everything it represented terrified her because it was a partnership of the most intimate kind, and one thing you learned early in her House—and especially as a Marshal—was that no partnership lasted forever.

  Partners got reassigned, or quit. Or died, usually in horribly painful and gruesome ways. Or maybe that was just her partners, but then, that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?

  It had happened to every partner she’d ever cared for—Ned, even Orin. She didn’t want it happening to Elix. Especially not because of her.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, a vision of the dark-haired captain sinking below the surface of that magma pool swam before her eyes, quickly morphing into one of him aflame and being buried under a rising tide of fungus. She blinked the sight away and stared out over the black water, straining to see something, anything other than the man she loved dying over and over again in increasingly awful ways.

  The light from her helmet did little to pierce the darkness. When she looked down into the water directly, the blue beam broke into a thousand reflections in the black water, giving her the illusion that the boat was gliding across the surface of a vast Khyber shard, its binding magic calling out to them, hungry and eager. She looked up again quickly, shaking the thought away.

  As she did, she thought she saw a dark smudge in t
he distance. Moving forward carefully, she pointed it out to the drow, who nodded.

  “We are nearing the opposite shore. Once we set foot on land again, we will be in the domain of the Spinner of Shadows.”

  “Who—or what—is the Spinner?” Sabira asked. Boroman ir’Dayne had said that the Spinner, or She, of Shadows was a deity peculiar to the Umbragen, but the drow spoke of her as though she were an actual, physical being, something akin to a queen.

  Xujil looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “She is … the She,” he said at last, “is the Spinner of Fate, the Queen of Shadow, the Well of the Umbra, the Womb and the Pit. She is Tarath Marad. She is … all.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sorry I asked.”

  She moved back to her position near Greddark at the stern of the boat, staring out over the water at the approaching shore. They were getting closer. She could feel it.

  Something moved below the surface of the lake a few feet off the starboard side of the vessel, humping up above the waterline and then back down again before she could point it out to the others. She’d never bothered to replace her shard axe in its harness, and now she put her makeshift oar down and grabbed the weapon, leaning over the edge of their floating mushroom cap.

  “What is it?” Greddark asked, instantly alert.

  “I thought I saw something,” she said, scanning the opaque water.

  “A leviathan,” Xujil said from the front of the boat, paddling faster.

  “What?” she and Greddark exclaimed in unison.

  “We happened upon one on our last crossing, but the sorceress defeated it. They are normally solitary. I did not expect to encounter another.” Xujil had told them that Tilde’s party had fought something in the water. He had failed to adequately communicate what that something was. “I would suggest we increase our pace.”

  Sabira grabbed her oar again and the four of them rowed in urgent unison, racing toward the ever-expanding shoreline. She actually thought, for a moment, that they might make it.