Anthology - Untold Adventures - A Dungeons and Dragons Anthology

Suddenly embarrassed, he looked down at himself, the torn wedding shirt, which revealed his tattooed chest and shoulders, slick with sweat. “ ‘Magister’-that’s a new one,” chucked the captain. “Is this creature capable of speech?”

“It is you who should be silent,” Astriana said. She turned, and Haggar followed her over the bridge into the tower. And she whispered to him as she walked through the guard chambers and tapestried corridors, so that he had to follow close behind her. “Among my people, it is customary for a man and wife to trade requests. You asked a question, and I answered. Now it is my turn. I want you to close this gate with me, and kill whatever creatures have crawled through from the Far Realm. Then it will be time for you to ask again.”

“Anything I want?”

“Anything you want,” she conceded, eyes fixed straight ahead. A pair of soldiers saluted, then drew back in surprise when they saw Haggar. “One more thing,” she continued without turning around. “You are not to speak of Lord Kannoth, or refer in any way to the magic he cast over us, or of the promise I made. These obligations can only be dissolved by the Summer Queen at the Court of Stars, whom I will petition as soon as we have done our work. That will be enough of an opportunity for my humiliation, as if I needed to dissolve a marriage with a pig or a goat. No, be quiet,” she went on, as he tried to interrupt her. “Among my people, my ugliness is already a legend. The part of a seductress was a new one to me, not one I could accomplish here. Doubtless I enjoyed it. Doubtless that was part of Kannoth’s joke.”

They had come to the center of the tower, a circular chamber that also contained a well, the interior echo of the colossal architecture outside. And in the middle of the well was an iron cage suspended from a hook and pulley and reached by an iron ramp. Without pausing, Astriana climbed the ramp and stepped into the cage, where she stood holding the bars. Haggar entered behind her, and at a nod from her, a pair of soldiers pulled the ramp away, leaving the cage dangling. Then another pair let down the chain; the cage descended down the length of the shaft, whose bottom was in darkness, invisible to Haggar as he peered between his filthy feet.

They passed storey after storey of iron balustrades, lit by glimmering lanterns. In time, Haggar guessed, they had penetrated below the foundations of the tower, and down into the rock. The air became damp and thick. As they descended, he felt his mood darken also. Astriana said nothing during all this time, but only stood with her hands on the iron bars, embarrassed, he imagined, at having revealed so much. Now that they could talk freely without fear of being overheard, she was silent. Nor could he think of what to say. “This is my duty as your husband,” he ventured finally, “to close this gate?”

She shot him a look of agonized contempt. “If Themiranth is dead, it is a blessing. Not once has he followed my command.”

A bell clanged and the cage jerked to a halt, dangling and groaning at the end of its stupendous chain. They hung suspended in a natural cavern, with stalactites and stalagmites the length of a man. Down below, a platoon of soldiers labored to secure them with long grappling hooks, and then to pull them to the edge of a metal structure, a wheeled staircase; when the cage grated against its iron edge, Astriana leaped onto it as if relieved not to be with him any longer in such an enclosed space, and sprang down the stairway, among soldiers very different from the eladrin in the upper tower. These were men in black armor, with hunched shoulders and heavy faces, stunted legs, and powerful arms.

They were inhabitants of the Feydark, Haggar guessed, firbolgs and goblins. One looked up, and he saw it was missing an eye. They clustered around Astriana as she descended the stairs, and she held out her hands, whether to welcome them or keep them at a distance, Haggar couldn’t tell. They moved aside to let her pass, and she waited for him to catch up. “If the watch captain is right,” she said, “we don’t have time to lose. You will see.”

Then she turned to speak to the one-eyed soldier in a language Haggar didn’t know. “He says he’s laid them in the antechamber,” she summarized after a minute’s talk. “Come.”

They passed into a torchlit corridor, rough-hewn from the rock. And then through an iron door into a vaulted hall, at the far end of which two figures lay in nests of rags. Astriana hurried to them and went down on her knees.

One was alive and one was dead, as the captain of the watch had claimed. Astriana knelt over the living one, clasping one of her hands and pushing the hair back from her face. A smoking lantern hung from an iron stanchion above their heads, and by its light Haggar examined the corpse of the other, a tiefling, he saw, with bosses of bone along the crest of his scalp, and curling horns that rose up from his brow, one intact, the other lopped off at the base. The creature was dressed in jointed armor, and in his stiffened hand he still clutched a druid’s staff, decorated with carved runes and also sheared off short. He lay on his back, and the straw and rags beneath him were soaked in his black blood.

Fascinated, Haggar studied the man’s face, his curled, heavy beard, his red skin, paler now, he imagined, in death. He knew the history of this maligned and hated race, how ancient human families had sworn pacts with devils and corrupted their entire lines. “What did you promise him?” he asked.

Astriana didn’t answer. The other woman was a shifter from the look of her, with a flat, feline face and jagged teeth. Hair grew on her cheeks and down her neck, and she was dressed in fur and leather. Or rather she had been, for she had ripped most of her clothing away with her long claws, and lay with her hairy body exposed. Her totem stick had fallen away from her and lay forgotten on the ground, a black shaft of tibia bone studded with uncut tiger’s eyes.

She had raised herself onto one elbow and was talking to Astriana in low, urgent tones. Astriana scarcely seemed to listen, but instead she busied herself rearranging the bedding so the shifter could lie more comfortably. And when the firbolg captain strode in, she turned on him. “Didn’t I ask you to take care of them? Bring her to my guardroom, to my couch. Give her water mixed with wine.”

“Lady, she’s a-”

“Do not tell me what she is.”

Later, she brought Haggar to a square stone chamber cut into the rock. Food and water had been laid on an iron table-roast capon, pepper sauce, and bread. They sat on iron stools. “To answer your question, I promised I would fill his boots with gold.”

“And her?”

“An invitation to the court of the Summer Queen at Senaliesse. The thanks of her majesty. You see,” she said, biting into a bone, “you work for cheap.”

“I would not have come here for those things.”

“Don’t I know.” And then after a pause: “Themiranth was a fool, but at least he did me this favor. No one will question my decision to bring druids from the mortal realm. The tiefling. You and the shifter. You have a toughness that the eladrin have lost, most of us.”

She grimaced, then continued. “Themiranth said it was because I was most at home with outcasts and degenerates. Creatures more like animals. He said it was because none of my own kind would look at me. Because of my ugliness.”

He said nothing, even though he imagined this confession cost her a great deal. He watched her take a gulp of water from a crystal cup. At first he’d been embarrassed to eat with her, until he’d noticed how messy she was, licking her fingers, wiping her mouth on her hand. She’d changed into new clothes, soldier’s garb that was heavier and plainer than the thin silks she’d worn in Cendriane.