by Tim Pratt
“Easy for the heir apparent to say.” Julen took a sip of wine and coughed, eyes watering, then grinned. “I’m so far down in the pecking order sometimes I think my father’s forgotten my name. Oh, they’ve taught me all sorts of things—lockpicking, poisoning, how to tell if someone’s lying, how to creep around. But no one’s grooming me for leadership.”
“I’m sure they’ll find a place for you,” Zaltys said. It was hard to think of Julen as an adult, though he was very nearly. They’d played together as children, and in part of her mind, he was still the laughing boy with jam smudged on his face, racing through the gardens.
Julen shrugged. “Probably. Everyone in the family has to pull their weight, and being a Guardian is a proud and noble thing, and so forth. There’s talk of apprenticing me to my eldest brother. He does business with dwarves and even drow sometimes. He’s always going down into caves and mines and tunnels.” He made a face. “Sounds even worse than living in the jungle, honestly. I was hoping for a posting to one of our trading partners across the gulf, some city where I can enjoy myself, out from under father’s thumb. But he keeps giving me scrolls and books to read about the Underdark lately, so I think they’re serious about apprenticing me. Sending me out here to the jungle is supposed to help me toughen up or get practical experience or something.” He belched.
“Practical experience in getting drunk, maybe,” Zaltys said with a laugh.
“I’m counting on you to be my teacher in this as in all things,” he said with a grin.
ZALTYS WOKE UP WITH A COTTONY TONGUE AND A thudding head. She sat up by the fading ashes of the fire, moaned, and picked up a canteen, sloshing the water around in her mouth for a while before swallowing. The sun was barely up, but by the standards of the camp, she was running late. She needed to get to Krailash’s cart and see about those rotations.
One of the sentries posted by the barrier carts shouted in alarm, and Zaltys sprang to her feet and raced in his direction. (Her mother had commented often on her tendency to run toward danger.) “What’s happening here?” she said. Three sentries were crowded together, their backs to Zaltys. One of them, a young man new to the caravan, turned, and his eyes widened. “Ah, an intruder, he somehow made it past the men posted in the woods.”
“Let me see,” Zaltys said, clambering up on the back of the cart so she could look down on their prisoner, who was on his knees, his hands raised in a show of helplessness. The guards had their spears leveled at him, but the man hardly looked a threat—he resembled one of the homeless drunkards who slept in the alleys of Delzimmer, his clothes filthy rags, hair a long and tangled mass, beard like a ragged pelt clinging to his face. His pale hands trembled, and with red-rimmed eyes, he gazed up at Zaltys and babbled something. Half the sounds were guttural and harsh, but interspersed were recognizable words and phrases: “darkness,” “caves,” “slaves,” “cages,” “trapped,” “help me,”—and “Krailash.”
Zaltys narrowed her eyes. “You, new man. Go and get Krailash. And tell my mother someone has wandered in.”
“Yes, Krailash,” the prisoner said, and then put his head in his hands, and began to weep and sob and speak again in that strange guttural tongue.
Quelamia arrived suddenly in that soundless, subtle way she had, stepping up to the back of the cart to stand beside Zaltys. “Oh, my,” she said. “That’s Deep Speech.”
“What?” Zaltys said.
“Undercommon,” Quelamia said. “The trade language of the denizens of the Underdark.”
“He’s awfully pale to be a drow,” Zaltys said.
“Human,” Quelamia said. “I can always tell a human.”
Julen clambered up on the cart too. “Wow!” he said. “I heard they caught a spy!”
“You think he’s a spy?” Zaltys said. “He looks … crazy. Sick. Lost.”
“Good disguise for a spy,” Julen said, crunching an apple, chewing, and swallowing. “You know? Send someone in as a poor lost wanderer or jungle refugee in need of help, hoping we’ll take care of him, and give him a chance to see what we do in camp, learn our secrets, all that.”
Krailash arrived, axe in hand, and pushed through the barrier carts. “What’s this, then?”
The prisoner lifted his face and stared at Krailash. He shouted wordlessly and flung himself toward the dragonborn, clutching one of his scaled legs and weeping against his knee. Krailash grunted. “Were you lost in the jungle, my friend?”
The man looked up. “Krailash,” he said, and the dragonborn stiffened. “I have been lost in the dark. I never thought I’d find you again.”
“Rainer,” Krailash breathed, then began bellowing, shouting at his men to lower their spears, to fetch blankets and food and water, to bring Alaia, to go now. Zaltys gaped as Krailash picked up the prisoner and strode off toward the center of the camp, carrying the man like a father cradling a baby.
Julen took another bite of his apple, watching them depart. “Who’s Rainer?”
“He was a guard,” Quelamia said. “He disappeared a long time ago. We’d assumed he was killed. Apparently he just got lost.”
“Lucky he was able to find the camp again,” Julen said.
“Yes.” Quelamia had a faraway look on her face, but then, she usually did. “Quite remarkable, actually. Almost unbelievable.” She hopped off the cart—she somehow managed to do it gracefully—and moved off after Krailash.
“Are mornings always this exciting?” Julen said.
“People hardly ever wander in out of the woods and then hug our chief of security,” Zaltys said.
“More’s the pity,” Julen said. “Funniest thing I’ve seen in ages.”
Zaltys was hoping to find out more about the man, but he was taken into Alaia’s cart, along with Krailash and Glory, and when Zaltys knocked, her mother irritably told her to come back later, they were busy. So much for being a full member of the family, she thought, and went out to walk the perimeter. She looked for Julen, thinking she could teach him about the camp’s defenses, but he was nowhere to be seen—apparently the Guardians taught you how to avoid work along with how to pick locks and poison knives. The jungle beckoned—she wanted to try out her new gifts, especially since no guards would trail after her—but she was unwilling to leave when the camp was buzzing with rumors and speculation about the wild man who’d somehow cheated death.
A few hours later Zaltys found Glory near the cook tent, gnawing a rib bone and frowning. Zaltys sat down on the rough wooden bench across from the tiefling and said, “Is that man all right? Rainer?”
Glory grunted. “I scanned his mind. Ugly mess in there. Very dark. Lots of mental blocks, which I didn’t care to push through, because who wants to see what kind of horrible snakepits of memory he’s had to cover up? He is who he says, though, as far as I can tell. Poor bastard.”
“He was underground?” Zaltys said, horrified. “All this time?”
“You know about the Underchasm,” Glory said.
Zaltys nodded. “Where all that land collapsed.” The Underchasm was a pit the size of a sea, collapsed in the great upheavals that had made Delzimmer a coastal city.
“What do you think all that land collapsed into?” Glory said. “There are vast caverns beneath us. The Underdark.” She shuddered. “Rainer’s been down there.”
“What, lost?”
“Enslaved,” Glory said. She tossed the bone, picked clean, on the ground for the camp dogs. “His mind’s a wreck, but he’s in good shape physically. Toiling for monsters underground is good exercise. Be careful if you go out in the woods. Whatever monsters took Rainer and dragged him underground could be looking for him.” She yawned. “Probing his mind was too much like work. They had me clean things up in there a bit too, so he could maybe sleep again someday. I couldn’t take away all the bad experiences, though, not without turning him into nothing but a body without thought or will. The bad experiences are too much a part of who he is. Ugly business. I need a nap.” Glory rose and sauntered away.
Zaltys went to her mother’s wagon, knocked on the door, and entered at her mother’s call.
Alaia looked up from her folding desk, where she was writing a letter. “Oh, hello, dear,” she said absently. “Quite a lot of commotion this morning, hmm?”
Zaltys unfolded one of the camp chairs tucked into a corner and sat down. “Is that man all right? Rainer?”
Her mother sighed. “For a certain value of ‘all right,’ I suppose so. He went through terrible ordeals, things we can’t even imagine. But Glory was able to soothe him a bit.”
“What will happen to him now?” She thought of the broken men she saw sometimes in Delzimmer, begging for coins by the harbor or just sitting, blank-faced, in empty doorways. Would that be Rainer’s fate?
“He was lost and injured while in the employ of the family,” Alaia said. “So the family will care for him, just as we would for a laborer crippled in the fields or a soldier maimed in our service. He’ll always have a livelihood in our employ.”
“He won’t … He can’t become a guard again.”
Alaia shook her head. “He was one of Krailash’s best men, but that was long ago. If he recovers fully and he wants to—but no. I think, once the family physicians and healers have made sure he’s not too ill, he will be given some less difficult task to do. A position in one of the households, or working in the gardens or kitchens. And if he’s not up to even that much work … Don’t worry, he’ll be kept comfortable.”
Comfortable. Zaltys imagined him sitting in a chair at a window, staring out at some peaceful vista, his mind broken. “Where is he now?”
Alaia gestured vaguely northward. “I sent him back to Delzimmer on horseback with a couple of the guards. Having him here in the camp, talking about slavers stealing people away into the darkness … I didn’t want him worrying the laborers. And, besides, I’m sure he wants as much distance between himself and this jungle as possible.”
Zaltys touched the hilt of the knife at her belt. “But shouldn’t we be worried about slavers? Glory said whoever took Rainer might be looking for him—”
Alaia put her pen down and massaged her writing hand, wincing as she pulled each finger and made the knuckles pop. “Glory enjoys making people worried and uncomfortable. But, yes, I’ve posted more sentries around the camp, and Krailash is letting his people know they should be alert. If any nasty creatures do come boiling up out of a hole in the ground, we’ll drive them back. Now, my darling daughter, if you don’t mind, I need to write a few more letters, to arrange for Rainer’s care back in Delzimmer.” Alaia shooed her away, so Zaltys folded up her chair and left the wagon.
She decided to go looking for Krailash, but she found Julen along the way, squatting in the shadow of a supply cart, an array of glittering bits of metal spread out on a cloth before him. Zaltys crouched down beside him, though she stayed out of the shade. Unlike most of the other people in camp, she didn’t mind the heat of the sun pounding down on the clearing. “What’s all this?”
“Lockpicks,” he said, holding up a narrow twist of black metal and squinting at it. “I had to leave home in a hurry, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget anything.” He sighed. “Not that there are any locks worth speaking of to practice on out here. What with the general lack of doors. My skills are going to get all rusty out here in the wilderness. I don’t know how I’ll pass my practical exam this fall. At least I’ll be able to keep up with my poisons and knife-throwing—no end of nasty creatures out here to kill, at least. And I’m sure I’ll be bitten by dozens of horrible animals, which can’t hurt in developing my resistance to poisons. Did you know in the Guardians we eat tiny amounts of poison for breakfast every day, to build up immunities? We’re supposed to carry a ridiculous array of antidotes and anti-venoms with us too. I must say, I prefer the bits of the job that involve knives.” He rolled up the cloth of lockpicks and tucked it away in a small traveler’s pack.
“You Guardians and your toys,” Zaltys said, shaking her head.
He snorted. “This from a woman with a clutch of magical arrows in her quiver?”
She laughed. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day?”
Julen looked around, then beckoned her closer. Zaltys obligingly leaned in. “I was belly-down on the roof of your mother’s wagon, my ear right next to the chimney, eavesdropping,” he said.
Zaltys widened her eyes. “You were spying on my mother?”
Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do. We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”
“Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”
“Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”
Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that. They were talking about Rainer?”
“They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he was imprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”
Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”
“Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”
Glory, Zaltys thought.
“Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”
She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”
Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers—it was the same day they found you.”
“You’re sure?”
“That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”
“I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.
“Ah. They … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.
Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said. He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him.”
Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”
“People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”
“But why? Why tell me my family was dead?”
“Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”
“Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of c
ourse, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really considered that they might be real. “If he … wait … did Rainer see my family down there?”
“He didn’t say. And your mother didn’t ask, at least, not that I heard. Rainer said there were other human slaves, though, along with snake people, bullywugs, kuo-toa, and creatures he couldn’t identify. The slaves labored in mushroom fields, harvesting food, and were used as live bait to catch horrible blind fish the derro like to eat, and sent in to do war against the enemies of the derro, which are, I gather, everyone in the world. Rainer says the creatures are mad, and coming from someone as broken up as he is, that’s saying something. He said he saw horrible things in the service of the derro.” Julen shook his head. “They fought the servants of gods whose names have been forgotten by the surface world. Living pools of blood. Creatures with wings like razors. Beholders. Purple worms, and once, a purple dragon. He finally saw a chance to escape in a recent battle, hid in the tunnels, and started following a snake because he had no other idea where to go. The snake led him to fresh air, and a crack in the rock, and once he reached the surface, he wandered until he found some river that leads to a waterfall—”
“Shattered Rainbow Falls,” Zaltys murmured. “It’s a day’s walk, but it’s beautiful there.”
“Yes. From there, he knew the way to the caravan site, and that’s how he found us.”
Zaltys stood, swaying a little from the hard wind of the revelations Julen had brought. “But if Rainer survived all these years, then my family might still be alive down there. In the dark. In thrall to monsters. If that’s true, family is the most important thing. It’s the one thing in this world I know to be true, family is everything.” She shook her head. “But he’s probably just crazy. I’m sure his mind is a mess, he must be misremembering, it was nearly twenty years ago, after all. What if he’s just mad? Mistaken?”