by Tim Pratt
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.
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.
Zaltys gestured to the ghost boar, which looked back at her with the sort of infinite, weary patience that serves for impatience among the spiritually enlightened. “Mother summoned me. Any idea what it’s about?”
“Sure.” Glory lifted a long, black pipe to her lips and took a puff, smoke rising in curls from her nostrils.
“Well?” Zaltys prompted.
“Horseman arrived a little while ago,” she said, taking another puff, clearly enjoying drawing things out. Glory liked to play mind games. “With another horseman behind him. Or should I say, horseboy. Krailash yelled at them for a while—he yelled at the older one, anyway, the kid just stood there looking annoyed and embarrassed—and then took them to meet with your mother. The horseman left a few minutes ago. But the boy … He’s still in your mother’s caravan.”
The boar snorted and started walking.
“What’s it all about?” Zaltys said.
“Nobody tells me anything,” Glory said. “What am I, a mind reader?”
“Yes,” Zaltys said.
“Bah,” Glory said. “You assume I care enough to read anybody’s mind.” She slammed the heavy black door after her, disappearing from sight.
Like all conversations with the tiefling, it had been more frustrating than illuminating—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a little illuminating. Zaltys followed the ghost pig, reaching back to scratch the diamond-shaped spot of scarred skin at the small of her back. It itched sometimes, but only when she got close to the jungle. Something to do with the humidity, her mother said. She’d made up an ointment, but it never did much good.
Two things that always wait for me in the jungle, she thought. The itching, and the dreams. On the whole, she’d rather have the itches. At least the ointment helped a little. Nothing helped the dreams: not the expensive sleeping potions her mother brought for her, not Glory’s attempts to make her forget the dreams instantly upon waking, not Krailash’s suggestion that she train so hard that she collapsed into a dreamless sleep at night. Her dreams were never troubled in the city, but as soon as she reached the jungle, they began. It was enough to make a girl want to sniff some terazul powder, even if using the drug was forbidden to the family, and stop sleeping entirely.
They’d reach
ed her mother’s wagon, a cozy little house on wheels. Zaltys slept there too, on the rare occasions when she didn’t simply sleep out under the stars or in a tree branch (always with guards posted below, as if she needed them, but Krailash wouldn’t let her do it at all otherwise). Still, despite her tiny bed tucked into a corner of the wagon, it was entirely her mother’s domain, all carved figurines and crystals and that odd combination of finery and efficiency that characterized the Traveling Serrats.
Zaltys went in without knocking, and stood, gaping, in the doorway. “What are you doing here?”
“That’s no way to speak to your cousin,” Alaia said, her blue eyes stern. Her spirit companion curled up at her feet, untroubled by the fact that it had to pass through her legs to do so, then vanished like mist rising from a lake in the morning. Alaia sat on a little divan, holding a delicate teacup. The boy beside her held a teacup too, though he didn’t look too happy about it. He looked, in a word, surly, his gaze downcast, his lips pursed, his dark hair hanging across his forehead and nearly covering his eyes.
“My apologies,” Zaltys said. “What are you doing here, Cousin?”
Julen shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “They made me.” Then, with a trifle more heat: “Dragged me out of bed. Made me ride horses for a tenday! My rear—” He glanced at his aunt and cleared his throat. “I’m not used to riding so many days in a row. Or eating all my meals out of saddlebags.”
“Your cousin,” Alaia said, “is on loan to us, from his father in the Guardians.”
Zaltys made a great show of looking around the room. “I don’t see any spies from rival families. I don’t see anyone trying to burn down our caravan, or steal our horses, or do anything that we’d need protection from.”
“His father thought it would be best if he learned some practical field work. To find out, as it were, what exactly he’s protecting.”
Zaltys frowned. “Then why didn’t he come with us when we left? Why send him chasing after our dust cloud for days?” She paused. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you, Julen. I always had fun playing chase and ambush and hide-and-find with you when we were small. And of course it’s nice to have more family around.” That was an axiom of life in the family, which was also the family business, though her mother sometimes amended it to, “It’s always nice to have family around … preferably around the next corner, or even farther away, if you can manage it.”
“I was supposed to join you, but I overslept.” Julen didn’t look at her. For a member of the Guardians, who were arguably even more deceitful by nature than the Traders, he wasn’t much good at lying. Presumably telling lies was something you got better at as you practiced, like throwing knives or shooting arrows.
“He ran away,” Alaia said. “Didn’t want to spend the next three months out in the bushes with the savages and the wild animals, if I understand his father’s letter correctly.” Julen attempted to sink into the divan, without much luck, and Alaia smirked. “Of course, my brother had some choice words for me too, since I didn’t send anyone to fetch him before we left. But my caravan is not a palanquin, waiting to carry this young man anywhere he likes at his leisure. My caravan is like the sun. The sun rises when it rises, and my caravan goes when it goes.”
Zaltys pulled over a chair and dropped into it, noting her mother’s moue of distaste at the dirt and leaves on the cushions, bad form—but not reacting to it. “Why would you want to stay in the boring old city anyway? It’s much more fun out here in the world.”
“Clean water,” he said, beginning to count on his fingers. “Which doesn’t have to be boiled before you drink it. Soft beds. Food that doesn’t come packed in a barrel or bleeding on the end of a hunting spear. Games, and parties, and shops, and walking by the harbor, and a library, and …” He shook his head. “What’s so good about the rest of the world? Nature? We build cities and great big walls to keep nature out.”
“Without nature you wouldn’t have any of the wealth that buys you all those other things you mentioned.” Alaia was amused. “Zaltys, be a dear and show your cousin some of the diversions to be had around camp. But don’t take him into the jungle without an escort, all right? My brother would not be forgiving if I let his son be killed by a deathrattle viper or a carnivorous vine.”
Julen stood, scowling. “I don’t need guards. I’ve been trained in knifework and unarmed combat by the head of security for the Guardians! I’m a pupil of the greatest street fighters in the city of Delzimmer, and—”
“There are things in the jungle that would take your knife away, use it to clean their teeth, and then stick it through your head hilt first,” Zaltys said. “Dagger-fighting is fine for drunkards in bars—though you’re only, what, twelve, so I guess you’re too young for that?—but it’s not much good in the jungle.”
“I’m fifteen, as you well know. And my daggers can—”
“Yes, fine,” Alaia said, rubbing her temples as if she had a headache coming on. “Take the discussion outside. Perhaps you can teach Zaltys some of your knife tricks, Julen, and she can teach you some of the ranger skills she’s picked up over the years.”
Zaltys left, Julen at her heels, and once they were on the ground outside, the door slamming shut after them, she sniffed. “I can’t make a ranger out of you in a summer, but maybe I can teach you which end of the arrow you point at your prey, and which leaves you shouldn’t wipe your bottom with, unless you want a case of the bloody itch.” Just saying the word “itch” made her reach around and scratch at the scar on her back.
“Why would I want to learn to be a woodcutter like you anyway?” He made a face. “What’s that smell?”
Zaltys opened her mouth just a bit, not enough for anyone to notice—she could smell better when she could taste the air with her tongue, for some reason, a quality she shared with no one else, as far as she knew—and then gagged and spat. “The latrine pits,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “Or possibly the animal pens. We’re upwind, mostly, but sometimes the winds shift.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered.
“Come on. You must be hungry after your trip. Let’s get some of that caravan food you were so eager to try.”
Julen groaned theatrically, clutching his belly. Zaltys couldn’t tell if he was genuinely complaining or just trying to be funny. They’d been friends when they were children, often playing together in the gardens, but that was before his studies with the Guardians and her journeys with the Travelers had necessarily pulled them apart. In recent years they’d only run into one another at family gatherings, and since the Travelers were out of the city for half the year, Zaltys missed most of those. The Guardians were a secretive bunch anyway. Zaltys had a few cousins she’d count as friends as well as relations in the Traders (not all of them were obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth; some of them were obsessed with numbers instead, which Zaltys could respect if not understand), but as a rule the Guardians kept themselves apart. They were the second-smallest branch of the family, consisting of just Zaltys’s uncle Ramul and his wife and many children, plus hirelings. But they wielded disproportionate power. If anyone committed the cardinal, unforgiveable sin—betraying the family—the Guardians were the ones to mete out punishment. And, in more practical terms, they kept rival trade groups from interfering with business in either legal or more underhanded ways. The Guardians had a certain mystique, and Julen’s brothers and sisters were spies, assassins, and masters of sowing rumor and deceit, but Julen himself was the youngest, and maybe he thought his family’s prowess and power accrued to him by right of birth.
But the family didn’t work that way. Birth got you certain things—you’d never wonder where your next meal was coming from—but if you wanted to advance, and take on more power and responsibility, you had to earn it. Zaltys wondered if this season with the caravan was a chance for Julen to prove himself, or punishment for his failing to do so.
She gently steered him around Glory’s wagon, since he couldn’t
see it, and Glory wasn’t above letting people walk into her might-as-well-be-invisible home just for the amusement of seeing them hit their heads.
“Why do you keep scratching? Did you wipe with some of the wrong leaves?”
Zaltys, who hadn’t even realized her hand had strayed to the old sore spot, crossed her arms. “No. It’s … my scar itches.”
“Oh, I heard about that,” Julen said. “You got it before you were adopted, right?”
“Yes. When my village was killed, I was wounded. It’s never healed properly. Mother says whoever attacked us must have used some sort of cursed weapon. I’m lucky I survived.”
Julen frowned. “Yes, I remember. Ah. Sorry.”
Zaltys shrugged. “Thanks, but it’s not a loss I feel. I don’t even know my original parents’ names. They were massacred, along with the others. The caravan buried them after they rescued me. I’ve seen the heap of rubble they’ve got for a grave.”
“There you are!” Krailash boomed, approaching them with the implacability and approximate mass of an avalanche. “Where are you two going?”
“Just to get some food,” Zaltys said.
“If you’re hungry, you can stay,” the dragonborn said. “But our scouts stumbled across a shadow snake not far from here. It killed one of our men, and the others are doing their best to track it, but we could use your help.” He glanced at Julen. “Your cousin is one of our best trackers.”
Zaltys grinned. “Come on, Julen. You’re supposed to be learning stealth, right, as part of your spycraft? You’ll never see a better teacher than a shadow snake.”