by Tim Pratt
Zaltys couldn’t finish them with a blade, not without coming in reach of their tentacles. She considered waiting for them to die to get the rest of her arrows, but what if their voices brought more creatures to help them—or predators to feed on them, which might like Zaltys as an appetizer? Every moment that passed took Julen farther away from her too. She’d always disdained the idea of magical “endless quivers,” finding it somehow vaguely unsporting to kill a creature with a magical arrow that would disappear in an hour anyway, but she wished she had one now. After all, shadow snake armor and a magical bow were hardly sporting, either. And, more importantly, this mission was nothing like sport.
The snake was certainly ready to go, slithering toward one of the two tunnels that led away from the cavern, one slanting up, one angled precipitously down. Zaltys looked, and—no surprise—saw a blue chalk mark just inside the down-slanting tunnel. The snake slithered off into the depths, and Zaltys followed.
From the roof of the cavern, otherwise inhabited only by the dying, a grell philosopher descended toward its fallen followers, watching their lovely, supple tentacles gradually go still. Grell tended to be solitary hunters, but occasionally one with an unusually strong will could bind others into its service—or woo them with a sufficiently potent philosophy. A philosopher without followers is essentially someone talking to himself, and the grell was, if not sorrowful about the massacre, at least annoyed. It could have intervened, of course, with psychic blasts, stunning the human girl long enough for her to be paralyzed by the toxic tentacles of its minions. She could have been eaten at leisure, or made into a slave if she’d proved receptive to the philosopher’s teachings.
I’ve held up my end of the arrangement, the philosopher thought at the darkness. It could sense, in its mind, the presence of that much greater mind—itself only a fragment of some larger and more potent whole—that had paused here to bargain. I spared your instrument, and let my people die. I don’t see why we couldn’t have let her simply pass by unmolested. Why provoke her?
She needs to grow accustomed to killing here, in the dark, the great mind replied. There is much more killing ahead of her.
And you’ll make sure the ones killed are my enemies? the philosopher asked. The derro who forced me to give them safe passage through my territory?
Those. Among others. So I have sworn. The dark voice withdrew.
What do you swear by, the philosopher mused, when you are yourself possessed of a name that others swear by? Who could punish a god for breaking an oath? They were deep questions, worthy of intensive pondering, and the philosopher let his mind consider them from every possible angle as he went about the grim pleasure of eating the corpses of his former students.
The derro didn’t fight with any particular strategy; they barely even had tactics. The first wave gibbered and swung crude clubs, shrieking wildly, a technique that many warriors used to frighten their enemies—but Krailash thought their shrieks were the real thing, actual madness instead of imitation ferocity. The derro in the second rank sprayed bolts from their repeating crossbows almost at random, and struck down more of their own attacking thugs than they did the human guards crowding the tunnel. What they lacked in battle proficiency they made up for with pure ferocity, and an enemy that behaves irrationally is hard for an experienced warrior to deal with.
But the guards were armored well, and they were hardened veterans, so they raised their shields and hacked off any derro limb that tried to break their line. The narrow mineshaft was actually a good defensive position, but the onslaught of the derro, who fought on, heedless of injury, until their wounds were too severe to ignore, was too much. Krailash called the rearguard forward and sent them into the fray, positioning himself in front of Alaia as her final defense. He shouted at her to retreat, to go back to the surface, thinking only that he could defend her long enough to escape before he died himself.
But instead, Alaia drew a small carved figurine from within her robes and began to speak in a low, firm voice.
Krailash knew, intellectually, that Alaia was a powerful shaman. He’d seen her spirit companion prowling around camp almost daily for decades, and had been healed by her magic during his service. But he’d never thought of her as a warrior, because she’d never gone into battle before.
So at first, he thought it was some new form of derro attack when two immense, humanoid figures made of stone tore themselves loose from the tunnel walls. But instead of attacking his wounded men, they pushed past them and began to batter at the derro. The spraying crossbow bolts made no impression on the stone men, who laid about with blunt fists. They had no finesse, these mountain-men; but they had power. Derro flew back, clearing the entrance, and allowing his men to fan out and flank the enemy. There weren’t that many derro left standing by then, only a dozen or so, and between the stone men Alaia had summoned, the ripping tusks of her spirit boar attacking them from the rear, and the men doing their best to fight on despite their wounds, the attackers didn’t stand a chance.
Krailash noticed one of the derro—armed neither with a club nor a crossbow, but with shackles dangling from his belt—attempting to slip down one of the side tunnels. With a roar, Krailash used his breath weapon, disgorging a cone of icy wind that struck the derro slaver and froze him in place. Swinging his battle-axe, Krailash cut down the few derro that were still moving until he stood before the shivering slaver. The derro was almost child-sized, no taller than a dwarf and more slender, with eyes as blank as a snowy field and dead white strawlike hair sticking up in ugly tufts. The slaver wore leather armor, but of a disturbingly pale hue, and Krailash wondered what animal—or person—had given its skin to make that leather. He snatched the shackles from the slaver’s belt. “Do you speak a civilized tongue?”
“Tongue is delicious,” it said in Common, speaking from lips tinged blue by cold. “Never had lizard tongue.” The slaver tittered.
Krailash glanced around. The stone men had vanished, merging back into the walls. Two of his men, Ramsey and young Lukas, appeared to be dead. The others were being tended by Alaia, who was quietly praising their bravery. He pointed to Morris and Hemingwood, the two who seemed least harmed and said, “You, watch the other tunnels. We don’t want to be surprised again.” Returning his attention to the derro, he said, “Do you want to live? Or do you want to end up like your fellows here?”
The derro shrugged, ice crystals showering from its shoulders, seemingly indifferent to the death all around it. The creature actually yawned, and its breath was all mushroom reek and carrion stink. Krailash struck it across the face with one of his great mailed hands, and the derro spun and fell to the ground, breaking the tendrils of ice that held it to the tunnel. The derro rose, still tittering, blood running down its face from a broken nose. “Are you my father? He used to hit me just exactly the same way.”
“I want to know where you take the slaves you capture,” Krailash said.
“Did you lose a little boy? We didn’t even have to hunt him. He came here and fell in a hole. Like a gift from above for the Slime King.”
Krailash wondered if that was some dark deity, or a title taken by whatever crazed monster led the derro, or something else, but it didn’t really matter. “I will have him back,” he said. “Or I will destroy every member of your filthy race. Do you understand? Does that penetrate your lunacy? You haven’t taken some jungle-dwelling savage this time. You’ve stolen someone with powerful friends.”
The derro’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “A valuable slave then. Our savants will be pleased. Perhaps they’ll send you little pieces of him on feast days.”
Krailash took the creature’s tiny neck in his fist, but didn’t squeeze. Not yet. Withholding that pressure was difficult, but Krailash was a being of iron will. “I will crush the life out of you.”
The creature shrugged again. “You aren’t above in the bright day now, lizard-man. You’re in our world, in the dark, on the doorstep of the Far Realm. You will suffer. You wi
ll be consumed.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Krailash said, struck by an inspiration. “We have a psion who can pry open your mind and find all your secrets. We’ll know everything you know within the hour. We’ll just take you to the surface—”
The derro began to flail so violently that Krailash almost lost his grip. Seizing the slaver by both arms—he wriggled like a live eel—Krailash grinned, showing his triangular teeth. The mention of the psion hadn’t frightened the creature. But the mention of the surface … “The sun is very bright up there, you know. In the jungle? It is merciless, and bright, and the sky goes on forever.”
“It’s night now,” the creature whispered, its eyes wide. “I’ve been to the surface before. I go to steal people away. It doesn’t frighten me.” The creature’s trembling gave the lie to that.
“But you go at night, don’t you? In the hours before dawn. And you always scurry back to your hole before the sun comes up. Have you ever seen the sun? It’s a great eye of fire in the sky. I can cut off your eyelids and stake you out on the ground so you have to stare up at the sun.”
“No!”
Krailash shrugged. “Once my psion empties your mind, why not? As good a way as any to dispose of trash like you.”
The derro closed its terrible eyes. “I can take you. To the slave pens.”
“You can, and you will,” Krailash said, and bound the slaver’s hands with its own iron shackles.
When Alaia and his remaining four men were ready to move again, Krailash nudged the derro with his boot. “Lead us,” he said. The derro showed him a trapdoor in the floor, and Krailash managed the tricky feat of descending an impossibly long ladder above a shackled prisoner held on a chain leash. The rest of the party followed him down, the spirit boar flickering and reappearing at the bottom of the shaft.
“Which way?” Krailash said when the path at the end of the shaft dead-ended at a corridor running off to the left and right.
“Left,” the derro said. “Nothing the other way but pit traps and grell.”
Krailash had spent many years in dungeons during his youth, and he had no fondness for either of those things, assuming they really waited down that tunnel. He wished the psion—what was her name?—were here. Her kind could sense a lie. “If you’re not telling the truth, the rest of your life will be very short, but it will also be so unpleasant that you’ll wish it was even shorter.”
The derro shrugged and inclined its head to the left. Krailash nodded. “Men, two of you in front of me. Alaia, if you’d stay behind me. And two more men to cover the rear.”
They walked in silence, Krailash’s head brushing the low ceiling. Eventually the derro stopped, nodding to a patch of porous orange stone. “Wormrock. Practically alive. Grows fast, so we use it to hide our passages. We just need to dig through here.”
Krailash frowned. “If you brought Julen this way, then surely it hasn’t had time to grow back yet.”
The derro tittered. “He went right. Fell in a pit trap. That’s how they caught him. But this is the fastest way to the pens. We might even beat him there. Wouldn’t that be nice for you? Get there before they decide whether to eat him or make him a mushroom farmer or give him to the Slime King as a toy?”
Krailash gestured. “Cayley, Fallon, Morris, Hemingwood—break through this rock.” The guards, all seasoned men who’d served with Krailash for years, obligingly stepped forward and hacked with their hand axes. The wormrock crumbled easily, leaving behind negligible piles of dust, and it wasn’t long before they’d chopped their way through into another tunnel, that one vast, easily seventy feet wide, roughly-gouged and streaked with dark black and red patches that Krailash wanted to believe was some cave lichen, but which looked much more like ancient dried blood. “What is this place?” Krailash said.
“We call it the Causeway,” the slaver said, and tittered. “It’s the cause of no end of trouble. Some great monster crawled through here, clawing its way through the rock, in the long long ago. Left a path so wide and broad and clear that fools think it’s safe.”
Another titter, and Krailash cuffed him on the side of the head.
“Just lead.”
They followed the Causeway for more than an hour, the passage angled steeply down all the while. The derro muttered about all the things that might kill them, and no number of cuffs to the ear or hissed orders could make it shut up for long. The sense of impending danger was so intense that Krailash began wishing something would attack them, just to break the tension. Spending too much time in the dark could make one go mad, Krailash thought. No wonder the derro were insane.
“Welcome to the depths,” the slaver said at one point, and giggled. “No more simple Upperdark for you. No basements or mineshafts or quarries or pitiful surface scratchings in the earth, no, no. We’re two miles down, at least, and some of the things that live here think the sun and stars are just stories told to frighten children. Can you feel the wonderful weight of all that stone above us?”
“Shut up,” Krailash growled.
Finally, after another long period of silent trudging and tense watchfulness, their prisoner pointed to a dark mouth of stone off to one side. “There. That’s the passageway.”
The hole was narrow enough that Krailash wasn’t sure he’d make it through without a pickaxe to widen the way, but by twisting his shoulders, he shoved his body through. He dragged the derro in after him by its chain, and pushed it to the front. The others filed in and gaped around. They were in a cavern obviously carved over centuries by long-gone flowing water. Bulging crystals emerged from the walls, some of them glowing with faint purplish light, and towering stalagmites rose from the floor. The party continued into the cavern for a while, and the slaver got more and more agitated as they went. “This way, this way!” The derro bounced on its heels, so eager to move forward that Krailash immediately feared an ambush, and tugged its chain, drawing it up short.
“There’s something strange about this one,” Alaia said, squinting at one of the stalagmites, far larger than the others they’d passed. “I don’t think it’s made of stone. It seems to be … How strange. Helmets, and rusting swords, and a cart wheel, and the belly of a wood stove, held together with something sticky, like sap. Something made this.”
A distant noise impinged on Krailash’s consciousness. The Underdark was not a very quiet place, really: the echo of footsteps reverberated hugely; there were rumbles of distant earthquakes or, more likely, creatures burrowing all around them; and the constant trickle and drip and roar of subterranean water was a rising and falling background hum. But the new sound was not like any of those: it was a buzz, like a swarm of small insects close by your head.
Or a swarm of very large insects rather farther away.
He jerked the tittering derro’s chain. “What is this place?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” it said. “It’s a swordwing nest.”
Krailash stared at the hideous prisoner. He’d never encountered a swordwing, but he’d once adventured with a dwarf named Halbert Hammerfist who had. The dwarf liked to boast of how his party had broken through the wall of a dungeon into a cavern and found it alive with hideous flying monsters. They’d slain the creatures, and found their nest, which was filled with treasures and relics looted from a thousand murders. Upon further questioning, the dwarf had gloomily admitted that everyone else in his party had died within moments of the swordwings’ initial attack, and that he himself had survived only by expending a wish he’d been granted by a djinn. Hammerfist had carried an axe with a viciously serrated blade he’d fashioned from the arm of one of the swordwings, and that blade had lent credence to his otherwise improbable description of the monsters. Human-sized insects with four immense wings each, bodies covered in chitinous armor of razored spikes, with limbs that were living weapons, capable of slicing a man in two right through his armor. Darting so fast in flight that they seemed to teleport—it was possible they did teleport—and attacking in coordinated tea
ms, they were death on the wing, and the dwarf reckoned they were the most dangerous things he’d ever encountered in a lifetime of adventuring aboveground and below.
“Swordwings,” Krailash said, and shook the derro. “Are you mad? We’ll all die! You too!”
“Yes,” the derro said placidly. “But I’ll die down here in the dark where I’m supposed to, not under some horrible sun.”
Krailash lifted his head as the sound of buzzing intensified, and started to shout a retreat, but then the derro looped its leash-chain around Krailash’s throat and began trying to strangle him to death.
WHAT STRUCK JULEN THE MOST PROFOUNDLY WAS HOW dark the Underdark wasn’t. Oh, at first it had been all shadow and mineshafts and abyssal depths, and his captors didn’t bother with torches or sunrods, but in the past hour he’d counted at least four separate kinds of natural illumination: glowing fungus; crystals lit with an inner light; patches of shining cave wall that must be the glowstone he’d read about; and disgusting, many-legged insects, big as mice, that swarmed over especially damp portions of the caverns and glowed like fireflies, but larger. As they descended ever deeper, Julen began to think the areas of absolute darkness were rarer than those in which there was some form of light. True, none of those lights were bright enough to read by, or even to tie your bootlaces by, but when deprived of light for too long, the human eye could make great use of even the faintest illumination, and with effort could turn a candle into a lantern and a lantern into a sun.