Prince of Ravens

CHAPTER TWO

How long Jack Remained in the Rothe paddocks he couldn’t begin to guess. In the sunless gloom of the Underdark, there was no dawn to mark the start of a day or sunset to end one. Time simply passed in dull, shapeless hours of toil. Malmor worked him to exhaustion; he would collapse in some stinking corner of the mushroom-cluttered fields, sleeping fitfully until discovered and kicked awake. At long intervals, surely a full day of the surface world, other slaves were sent to the kitchens beneath the brooding drow tower to bring back pails of bland gray porridge to the paddocks. And then it was back to the never-ending work of tending the dark elves’ herds.

Jack soon learned to loathe the rothe, the dark elves’ cattle. They were shaggy, stinking subterranean musk-oxen that devoured huge amounts of fungi Jack never would have imagined to be edible by anything, and soon enough turned that fungi into equally huge amounts of foul droppings. The creatures were not as large as surface cattle, standing little higher than Jack’s breastbone, but they were solidly built; well-armed with sharp horns; and very, very strong. Worse yet, they were far less stupid than they appeared, and possessed an aggressive, sullen temperament. The first time his meager meal of porridge was brought to him in the fields, two of the creatures ran him off from his pail while a third, clearly the ringleader, knocked it over and lapped up Jack’s lunch.

Naturally, he bent his every effort to absenting himself from the situation as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the drow and their trustees were well aware that he might not voluntarily remain in their service, and supervised him with maddening thoroughness. Whenever Malmor wasn’t in sight, one of the lesser overseers working for him kept an eye on Jack: Two-Tusks the orc, a rabid gnoll called Karshk, the hateful dwarf Craven, or one of the other boss-slaves who watched over the captives working in the paddocks. Jack discovered that Malmor and his thugs had an uncanny gift for anticipating him; whenever slaves were sent to work in distant enclosures of the rothe paddocks where a captive might be tempted to make a run for it, the overseers never failed to pull Jack out of the work party for duties close at hand. When field-slaves were sent to the castle to draw pails of porridge, Jack always seemed to be the last one to learn that food was available and consequently drew the meagerest portion. Soon enough Jack’s limbs trembled from weakness, and the aromas of dripping roasts and potato-filled stews came to haunt his dreams.

Jack had always imagined that a long period of forced servitude might offer a clever-witted and resolute fellow such as himself the opportunity to rise to his circumstances. His enemies might believe they had broken him, but still the fires of vengeance would smolder in his heart. In the most wretched of circumstances he would naturally find the keys to his eventual freedom: discarded tools that could be cunningly hoarded to improvise weapons or disguises, the slow establishment of camaraderie and trust with fellow-prisoners who could help him on his way, the inevitable appearance of patterns in the guards’ activities that he could exploit in a cunning plan. In the bards’ stories such things always came to wronged prisoners who persevered in their toil … but not to Jack. He was beaten severely whenever he touched anything that wasn’t a shovel. His fellow-prisoners (a motley assortment of orcs, wretched human or dwarf slaves, goblin rabble, and worse) hated him and clearly intended to murder him as soon as Malmor and the other overseers weren’t watching. And hunger and toil soon dulled his wits into something about as useful as the miserable gray slop he had to fight for at each meal.

Magic, of course, would have helped him to escape easily. But the Weave remained dull and distant, so much so that Jack began to fear that it was somehow completely absent in the dark elves’ domain, or that his long imprisonment had completely numbed his ability to perceive it. Whenever the overseers weren’t watching (which wasn’t often) he tried every spell he knew, with the same result-he waved his hands, he babbled some nonsense, and nothing happened. And, naturally, if any overseer caught him skulking off to do nothing, a beating followed immediately.

In the rare moments when Jack discovered enough energy to take note of his situation, all he could manage was a sort of confused indignation. Someone was the author of his misfortunes, but he had no idea who, because he couldn’t remember a thing about how he’d come to be entombed in the mythal stone. “A man can be measured by the quality of his enemies,” he told himself, “and clearly I had many formidable adversaries.” He knew, for example, that the ever-prying, ever-suspicious Knights of the Hawk blamed him for a number of thefts and escapades in the noble quarters of Raven’s Bluff. Jack didn’t see why they should trouble themselves about such things when he went to great lengths to spread his depredations around a large number of wealthy folk, none of whom were greatly injured by any one burglary on his part; his attentions were certainly no more onerous than ordinary taxation, and they didn’t set the Knights of the Hawk on tax collectors, did they? That, of course, suggested the possibility that one of the city’s thief guilds had arranged for his abduction to remove him as a rival, but that, too, seemed unlikely. Guilds were highly imaginative in their methods for dealing with freelancers such as Jack, but entombing him in a magical rock a mile below the surface seemed overly … subtle.

“Subtlety is the hallmark of a wizard,” Jack mused aloud when next he resumed his deliberations. The fact that he was magically encysted rather than simply bricked up in an alcove was clearly a sign of arcane talent. Therefore, it seemed likely that his unknown adversary was a wizard of some sort. Three potential culprits sprang immediately to mind: Zandria, the Red Wizard who had often threatened Jack for meddling in her affairs; the mysterious Yu Wei, the wizened old Shou who served the Warlord Myrkyssa Jelan; and the dreadful necromancer, Iphegor the Black, who so far as Jack knew consented to serve no one. If Jack were to be honest with himself, all three had good reason to act against him. Jack had been the principal actor in the defeat of Myrkyssa Jelan’s plot to infiltrate Raven’s Bluff, frustrating the master plan of Yu Wei’s liege-lady. He’d raced Zandria to the prize of the Guilder’s Vault in ancient Sarbreen, capturing the most valuable treasures before she recovered them. And it was unfortunately true that Jack might have had some small part to play in the untimely death of Iphegor’s dearly beloved familiar, which had taken the form of a rather small and frail mouse. The necromancer’s failure to provide himself with a sturdier companion was hardly Jack’s fault, but Iphegor might have seen things otherwise.

Zandria, Yu Wei, or Iphegor? Or the Knights of the Hawk? Or some hitherto unknown enemy? Someone was responsible for the fact that Jack now stood knee-deep in rothe dung, driven to exhaustion by vicious dark elves and their even more vicious slave overseers as he slowly starved to death, and the more he thought it over, the more the sheer injustice of the thing angered him.

The worst part of it was that his antagonist had likely been dead for decades. Even if he somehow managed to escape from his current thralldom, he could do little to set the matter straight other than perhaps dumping a bucket of rothe dung on the grave of his deceased enemy-a purely symbolic act, and not at all as satisfying a redressal as he might hope for. “It’s said that living well is the best revenge,” he finally resolved. “Fair enough; the course of my retribution is clear.” The sooner he could leave the fields of Chumavhraele behind him and enjoy life in some civilized place again, the better.

With a sigh, he picked up his shovel and attacked another pile of rothe dung.

One day (Jack had discovered that there was, in fact, a “day” of sorts in the dark elves’ fields and mines, marking mealtimes and rest periods) the tedium of his routine was broken by a commotion in the stockyard close under the battlements of Tower Chumavhraele. Jack was engaged in filling a cart with dung for transport back to the fields where the mushrooms that served as rothe fodder were grown when a gang of hobgoblins marched out of the great fungal forest, driving before them a score of human men and women. Most of the other field-slaves paused in their work to stare at the procession; Jack decided that it was safe to follow their lead and indulge his curiosity, so he lowered his shovel to watch.

“What is this?” he whispered to the slave working alongside him, a stoop-shouldered dwarf named Hargath, who had so far ignored him-a better treatment than Jack received from many who worked under Malmor’s supervision.

“New captives,” Hargath replied. “The slavers catch ’em up top and bring ’em down here to sell to the dark elves.”

The prisoners were a sorry sight, indeed. Some were injured, limping along or nursing bloody gashes and ugly bruises. Most were in their smallclothes, although a few had managed to keep a torn shirt or a ragged pair of breeches around their waists through the long march down from the surface. They bore their misfortune in a variety of manners, some stoic, some weeping and pleading, a few glaring about in anger. Jack’s eye was drawn by one fine-looking young woman with short-cropped hair of midnight black and a proud, defiant set to her shoulders. Her brocade dress suggested that she came of a well-to-do family, or at least had before falling into the slavers’ hands. She and her fellow prisoners were all bound with iron manacles, which in turn were fixed in staggered pairs to a great chain that all the captives together had to carry. The hobgoblins-no, actually, some of the slavers were human, Jack noted-jeered and cursed at their prisoners as they rearranged them into ragged lines to best display them for sale.

“What will become of them?” he asked the dwarf.

“Who cares?” Hargath muttered. “Some for the fields, some for the tower kitchens, most to the mines and tunnels, I guess.”

A small party of drow emerged from the castle and came out to meet the slavers. Jack recognized a few of the guards he’d seen patrolling the edges of the paddocks and fields, including Varys, the one who’d beat him for speaking on the day he first arrived. A priestess in the black and silver garb of the demon-queen Lolth led them. The priestess eyed the captives with a grudging nod, and then turned to one of the human slavers. “These seem better bred than the wretches you typically pawn off on us, Fetterfist,” she said. “I am impressed; they might actually last a tenday or two before keeling over.”

“My wares are largely a matter of chance, my lady, but sometimes opportunities arise,” the human slaver replied. He was a tall, bony man with a lantern jaw and long yellow hair that escaped from beneath a curious leather cowl obscuring the upper half of his face. “On most occasions I ply my trade in cheap winehouses and squalid slums, but yesterday I fell on a careless merchant caravan a few miles outside of town. There are no consumptive doxies or shiftless drunkards here; these are strong, healthy drivers and porters.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Of course, my expenses were higher than normal, and I must charge accordingly for these.”

“Your expenses are hardly my concern,” the drow priestess observed. She poked at the shoulder of a sturdy young man who stared down at the ground.

“Ah, well. If you will not make an accommodation for goods of exceptional quality, I suppose I’ll return to my customary methods,” Fetterfist the slaver replied. “There’s no point in paying for a large crew to bring you quality goods if I can’t make up the difference in costs at the time of the sale. I’ll be back in a few days with a lot of the typical quality, which I’ll be happy to sell you at the customary price.” He motioned to his men, who began to push and shove the captives back into marching order.

“Wait a moment,” the priestess objected. “Where do you think you’re taking these?”

“Back to the surface, of course. I know a pirate of the Inner Sea who would be happy to take them off my hands.”

Jack smiled at the slaver’s skillful shrug of resignation. The fellow knew a thing or two about bargaining, it seemed, which likely came in handy in his sinister vocation. He very much doubted that Fetterfist had any pirate acquaintance waiting to buy whatever the dark elves wouldn’t take, but the priestess had no way to know that. The suggestion brought a sour glare to her ebony countenance.

“I think not, Fetterfist,” she snapped. “The captives stay here. If you don’t care for that, you and your men can join them.”

The tall slaver smiled beneath his cowl. “Then who will bring new stock to your doorstep next month, or the month after?”

The dark elf scowled, but she, of course, had no answer to the slaver’s point. Instead she ignored Fetterfist for a moment, and continued her scrutiny of the wretched captives he’d brought her. “I see twenty-three here,” she observed. “That makes one hundred and fifteen pieces of gold at the normal price.”

“I couldn’t possibly sell these for less than eight pieces of gold each, my lady,” the slaver replied with such earnestness that Jack almost believed the fellow. He reached out and seized the pretty dark-haired girl by her bare arm, dragging her out of line. “And this one is quite special, indeed. I have here Seila, the daughter of Lord Norwood; I am sure that your marquise would find her a useful prize indeed.”

“Norwood’s daughter?” the priestess said. Her eyebrow rose, and she turned to study the dark-haired young woman, who squared her shoulders and glared back defiantly. “That might be worth something.”

“She is yours for five hundred gold crowns,” Fetterfist said.

The priestess snorted. “Ridiculous! I know very well that you would not dare to sell her anywhere in the surface world, slaver. Her father’s agents would pursue her, and you, to the ends of Faerun. However … the marquise may find her plight amusing. I might pay fifty gold crowns for her, I suppose.”

Jack nodded to himself. The Norwoods had been around during his days in Raven’s Bluff; he wasn’t surprised that the family had continued to flourish during the intervening century. If the girl was a Norwood, then she came of a well-to-do family, indeed; she must have an army of retainers and hired swords searching all over the Vast for her.

“My lady, you wound me, you truly do,” Fetterfist protested. At that point the slaver and the priestess fell to dickering over the price, arguing back and forth, but Jack noticed that Hargath had suddenly lowered his head and started to shovel again. With one more glance for the dark-haired girl in the fine dress, Jack followed suit, throwing heaping shovelfuls into the stinking cart.

“What’s this? Shirking again?” Malmor roared from behind Jack. The fat bugbear was remarkably light of step when he put his mind to it, and Jack couldn’t count the times the overseer had managed to sneak up on him. Naturally, Malmor had come upon the scene in the moment after Hargath had resumed work and before Jack had done the same. The bugbear snatched one of the slave-beating sticks-actually a specially preserved tentacle from a grell, Jack had learned-and gave Jack a terrific smack across the shoulders. The blow would have been bad enough, but the tiny stingers in the treated tentacle added a blaze of fiery agony to the overseer’s switching. The unfortunate rogue cried out and folded to the ground in pain, overcome by Malmor’s savage blow.

“You work, you eat,” Malmor snarled. “Work not, eat not, no, no. If you hope to eat tomorrow, you had better not let me catch you shirking again.” The bugbear kicked dung into Jack’s face while Jack was groveling on the ground, and then he strutted away, evidently satisfied that he’d put Jack in his place once again.

“If you won’t be eating at the end of the shift, could I have your portion?” Hargath asked.

“But of course,” Jack mumbled in reply. “I am nothing if not generous toward my friends. Although I would like to point out that next time you notice Malmor approaching, you might offer a small cough or low whistle to put me on my guard.” He slowly climbed back to his feet and looked back toward the new slaves. It seemed that Fetterfist had concluded his dealings with the priestess; the slaver gang was busy turning their captives over to the dark elves. The dark-haired girl was looking right at Jack, wincing; he realized that the commotion Malmor had caused by beating him must have attracted her attention.

“Well, that’s one way to catch the eye of a pretty girl,” he reflected. With as much grace as he could muster given the splattering of rothe dung he wore and the agonizing burning in his back, he gave her a rueful smile and a small bow before picking up his shovel and returning to work. The drow quickly sorted through their new slaves, breaking them up into several different groups. One group was marched back down the road through the mushroom-forest toward the lakeshore excavations, and another toward the mines and tunnels. The girl and a few others were led to the tower that overlooked the fields and shore, while the remainder was assigned to the rothe paddocks to work under Malmor. The bugbear welcomed his new drudges with blistering oaths and frequent clouts to heads and shoulders.

Jack watched the dark-haired girl vanish into the shadows beneath the castle’s walls. He liked to think he’d made an impression on her. With his back and shoulders burning from the grell-stings, he returned to his work.

With the arrival of new captives, Jack was surprised to discover that conditions in the fields improved somewhat. His days were still full of dull, filthy toil, but the presence of fresh workers in the paddocks meant that there were more hands sharing the labor. The bullies and malcontents among the old slaves turned their attentions to the task of putting the new slaves in their proper place in the paddocks’ pecking order. More important, Malmor had more workers to keep track of than before, and his eye was not fixed constantly on one prisoner. Jack found more opportunities to carefully survey the bounds of his world, taking note of the obstacles surrounding the paddocks and the frequent patrols that deterred any would-be runaways. He spoke with the newcomers about the route they’d taken down from the surface and what they’d seen in their march through House Chumavh’s territories. He even found more time to quietly experiment with his spells, trying to determine what exactly was wrong with his magic. He was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that he would have to make his escape with his native stealth and guile, but he’d be much more likely to reach the surface alive if he could take on the shape of a dark elf or simply turn invisible and walk off. Unfortunately his spells still eluded him; the magical Weave was dull and dark, and the unseen strands of magic that should have responded to his words and gestures refused to answer him.

A few days after the arrival of Fetterfist’s slaves, Jack was roused early to go up to the tower kitchens to draw breakfast for the field-workers. At first he bitterly resented the loss of a half-hour’s additional rest, but he realized that the chore at least offered him the chance to see a part of his surroundings he hadn’t yet-and perhaps catch a rare and precious glimpse of a female with fewer than four legs. With three other field slaves, he pushed the oxcart-like trolley with its empty tin pails over a road that circled beneath the battlements of Tower Chumavhraele. Strange, soft-glowing globes of purple and green magelight drifted along the crenellations or hovered above the dark gates, casting an eerie eldritch light over the castle’s spires. Orc, bugbear, and the occasional ogre or minotaur slave warriors stood their posts vigilantly, supervised by drow sergeants and officers. None took any special notice of the field-slaves and their creaking cart as they followed the path to a small side-gate leading in to the kitchens.

The kitchens were huge, a vast maze occupied by scores of cooks, dishwashers, and scullery servants. The field-slaves’ porridge bubbled thickly in a large cauldron by the door, under the supervision of a middle-aged half-orc woman who carried an overseer’s stinging-rod at her broad waistband. Jack and his fellows brought in the pails, filled them, and loaded them back on the cart. “Hurry up, you stupid clods,” the overseer bellowed. “Now my kitchen stinks of rothe crap. I should flog the lot of you!”

Jack decided on the spot that he had no more use for the chore of fetching porridge, but then he caught sight of the dark-haired Seila Norwood. She was toiling as a laundress, stirring sheets and spreads in a huge vat of steaming water. The girl happened to look up as he walked past, arms full of tin pails, and their eyes met for an instant before she turned away to tend another vat. Jack could see the exhaustion and despair in her eyes, but there was something else there, too, a small spark of defiance that hadn’t quite faded; he hoped that his own eyes still held that spark, too.

From that day forward, Jack made it his mission to be chosen for meal-fetching as often as possible. The trick, of course, was that one couldn’t very well ask to do it or else Malmor out of pure spite would simply say no. The bugbear assumed that if anyone wanted one job over another it was because they’d found a way to shirk or malinger. Jack tried to arrange his dung-shoveling and slop-hauling in such a way that he’d be in easy sight of the push-cart they took up to the castle kitchens when mealtime drew near, and that was partially successful; the bugbear and the other overseers were in the habit of ordering the first person they caught sight of to do whatever needed doing next. But after a day or two Jack realized the real trick was to act as if he didn’t want to push the heavy cart up to the castle, after which Malmor naturally picked him first at every opportunity. Sometimes it worked, and he saw the girl; sometimes it didn’t, and he missed her in the kitchens.

A couple of tendays after he’d seen her in the castle kitchens, Jack finally found a chance to speak to the captive noblewoman. The rothe were brought in from the paddocks for shearing, because the drow made a thick, oily wool from their shaggy coats-nothing a dark elf would wear personally, but useful enough in the sort of places where surface folk might use canvas or heavy burlap. It was a difficult and dangerous job. The rothe didn’t care to be sheared and were only too happy to gore anybody associated with the task, but in time it was done, and the dirty rothe clippings were gathered in huge bales and brought up to vats set up outside the castle kitchens to be boiled clean.

Jack naturally carried his first armful of the stuff to the cauldron where the dark-haired girl worked. As he helped her get the shearings into the hot water, he said in a low voice, “A pleasure to meet you, finally, even if the circumstances are regrettable.”

“I remember you,” she whispered in reply, careful not to look at him directly or to interrupt her work. “You were the one that bugbear beat the day we arrived.”

Jack nodded. “It’s a habit of his, which I am trying to discourage. You are Seila Norwood, are you not?”

“Do I know you?” she asked.

“I heard what Fetterfist said when he sold you to the dark elves.” He went to fetch another armful of shearings, and brought them back to her cauldron.

“How long have you been here?” she asked when she spoke again.

“I came here perhaps a tenday before you arrived.”

“Then I am sorry for you. This place is horrible, and the drow … I never imagined such cruelty existed. They are monsters, each and every one of them.” She fell silent as one of the kitchen overseers moved by, stirring the greasy wool with a heavy paddle until the overseer moved away. “I should have made Fetterfist cut me down rather than throwing down my dagger. Death would surely have been better than this miserable existence.”

Jack shook his head in disagreement. “You must not give in to despair, dear lady. Where there’s life, there’s hope.”

“Hope? What hope? I see little cause for hope.”

“Sooner or later the dark elves’ vigilance must wane,” Jack pointed out. He went for another armful of wool, careful to look like he was working hard enough to avoid a beating but not so hard to make an overseer wonder why he was doing more than he had to. When he returned to the girl’s cauldron, he resumed where he’d left off. “They may be clever and cruel, but surely there is some opportunity for escape they have overlooked. Needless to say, finding it will be quite impossible if you end your life.”

Seila Norwood laughed bitterly. “Escape? Believe me, I’ve tried. Even if we got away from the Tower and the fields, we’d be lost in the Underdark, with miles of monster-filled tunnels between us and home.”

“Oh, that,” Jack answered. He gave a small shrug. “That part concerns me not at all. I know the way back to the surface.”

“You do?” She straightened and looked more closely at him.

“I do. There is a levitating stone platform not very far from here that can take us up to the lower halls of the old dwarven city of Sarbreen. It is true that Sarbreen is haunted by its share of dangerous monsters, but I am reasonably well acquainted with its halls and passages. I feel confident that I can avoid them and find my way back to Raven’s Bluff.”

“Grelda,” she muttered under her breath. Jack fell silent, just as the half-orc kitchen overseer stomped past, fixing one ill-favored eye on Jack. He hurriedly dropped one more handful of rothe wool into the cauldron, and went for another load. The heap of shearings was growing smaller all too fast; he didn’t want the conversation to end.

When he returned, Seila glanced around carefully and asked, “If you know the way out, why are you still here?”

“The difficulty lies in eluding the guards and overseers in the rothe fields. I doubt that I could reach the transport-platform without being caught, and even if I did, it seems very likely that it would be guarded.” Jack shrugged. “This would be much easier with my magic, but it seems to have deserted me.”

“Your magic-are you a wizard, then?”

“A wizard, bah! Mummers and fakers, in my opinion. No, I am a sorcerer of some skill among my many other talents … but, as I have just noted, my magic seems peculiarly fickle these days.”

The girl frowned, digesting Jack’s remarks. Then she gave herself a small shake, and glanced up to meet his eyes. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I am Jaer Kell Wildhame,” Jack answered. “Formerly of the Vilhon Reach, which I understand is no longer in existence, having been destroyed by some untoward event known as the Spellplague. My friends call me Jack.”

“The Vilhon Reach?” Seila said. “I don’t understand. How is that possible?”

“It is something of a long story. You see-”

He was interrupted by the whistling sound of Malmor’s stinging-rod striking flesh and a cry of pain from another field-slave a short distance away. “That’s all, maggots!” the bugbear shouted. “No more loafing to be done here. Back to our paddocks, our paddocks. The rothe are waiting, yes, yes.”

Seila grimaced. “You must go, Jack,” she said under her breath.

“So it seems.” He made a show of picking up tufts of wool he’d dropped nearby, delaying the inevitable. “Do not despair, Seila. There must be a way out; sooner or later I will discover it. When I do, I promise you, I will not leave you here. Our chance will come, and both of us will see the sunlight again. I swear it.”

“Brave words,” she murmured with a small smile.

He paused just long enough to give her a wink, then hurried over to join the other paddock-slaves as they trudged back down to the fields. It was unlike him to make a promise with the full intention of keeping it, but he realized that he meant every word of what he’d said to Seila. The feeling was unsettling, and he paused to examine it more closely. “Well, of course,” he told himself. “If I escape alone, I would find myself a penniless vagabond in the city streets. But if I rescued a noblewoman from the drow, who knows what sort of reward I might expect? Why, Seila Norwood might be worth rescuing even if she were a scrawny, plain-faced shrew, which of course she is not.” If he knew where the dark elves were keeping a coffer full of precious gemstones, he would certainly try to carry it off when he made his escape. A valuable captive was not much different, when one considered the question carefully.

Under Malmor’s eye, the slaves returned to the fields and resumed their normal duties. The rothe were in an especially murderous mood after their shearing, and several of Jack’s fellows were gored before the herds settled down again. Despite this, his spirits were high for the rest of the day, as he replayed his conversation with Seila Norwood again and again in his mind. It was about the only pleasant experience he’d had since his removal from the mythal stone.

The next day, Dresimil Chumavh sent for Jack.

He was engaged in shoveling rothe feed from the back of a wagon into a feed trough when Malmor led a trio of dark elves into the fields. “There, masters,” the bugbear simpered. “You see, I have looked after him, after him. The human is well.”

Jack didn’t feel very well. He was cold, filthy, and exhausted, and he’d lost at least fifteen pounds from his wiry frame in the tendays or months he’d been enslaved. He paused in his shoveling, wondering what new devilry was at work.

“You!” one of the drow soldiers snarled. “Come here!” Jack dropped his shovel and wearily climbed down from the wagon, presenting himself before the warrior. The fellow looked him over and frowned. “Are you the one called Jack Wildhame?”

“I am,” Jack replied. Seeing a flicker of dissatisfaction in the dark elf’s eyes, he quickly added, “I am, master.”

The dark elves frowned in distaste. “He stinks,” one of the others announced. “We cannot bring him before Lady Dresimil like that.”

“The kitchens,” the first drow decided. “They’ll have a washtub. You come with us, slave.”

The soldiers marched Jack back up to the Tower kitchens. Jack kept his eyes open for Seila, but she was nowhere in sight. On the bright side, the dark elves instructed the kitchen slaves to make ready a washtub, and ordered Jack to clean himself quickly in the hot water. When he’d finished with the worst of the grime and filth, the guards produced clean servant’s clothing matching that worn by the other workers in the castle. For the first time in days and days, Jack felt warm and clean, even if he couldn’t quite get the stink of the rothe off of him. Satisfied that he was as presentable as he was going to get, the drow soldiers took him through the Tower’s echoing stone corridors before leading him out through the stronghold’s main gate. They turned onto the road Jack had been brought down when he first arrived, and set off toward the lakeside ruins at a quick pace. Weakened as he was by his labors, Jack found it hard to keep up.

A half-mile’s walk brought them back to the heart of the dank, muddy ruins and the plaza surrounding the wild mythal. Scores of slaves were hard at work scrubbing and polishing the ancient tiles covering the ground, while more worked to repair the crumbling walls surrounding the square. A dozen thralls-most of them ragged-looking humans who wore silver collars glowing with arcane glyphs-stood in a circle around the stone, chanting words of magic under the direction of drow wizards. Mages enslaved by the dark elves? Jack wondered. He grimaced as he realized that now he knew why Dresimil had need of slaves with arcane talent. If he had retained some of his affinity for magic, he might very well have been one of the exhausted wretches standing around with a silver collar on his neck. What great enterprise are the dark elves engaged in? Jack wondered. Some mighty effort was underway, but what was it? He was dying to ask his captors the purpose of it all, but he swallowed his curiosity. At best his questions would be ignored; more likely he’d be beaten again for speaking out of turn.

He studied the mythal as his guards escorted him across the plaza, and noted with some surprise that the stone seemed to be taking on a subtle, glossy sheen, almost as if it were growing a little translucent. There was a faint green luminescence hiding deep in the stone pillar, and he realized that he could very dimly perceive a glimmer of magical energy gathering in the mythal’s heart-the first hint of magic he’d sensed since waking up in this dismal new age. Jack slowed to look more closely, but a sharp glance from the guards escorting him prompted him to pick up his pace, and he followed more closely as they led him to a pavilion standing at one side of the plaza, overlooking the work. Dresimil and her brothers were there, observing the efforts.

“Lady Dresimil, we have brought the slave you asked for,” one of the warriors said. “He was rather rank. We took the liberty of having him wash and put on clean clothing.”

Dresimil turned and gave the guards an absent nod. “Very well,” she murmured, dismissing them. The warriors withdrew, leaving Jack alone with three noble-born dark elves.

Jack drew himself up, clicked his heels, and bowed. “My lady,” he said.

“Charming as ever, I see,” Dresimil replied. “Good. I’d feared the work in the fields might prove too much for a man of your delicate constitution.”

“It is somewhat more rigorous than I would have hoped, but I do my best,” Jack said. He longed to explain just how disagreeable he found the circumstances she’d thrown him into, but bit back on the words. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of knowing how miserable he was, but it was really a question of self-preservation. If he complained too loudly, Dresimil might be stirred to think of some new and even less pleasant use for him. Fortunately the dark elves seemed affable at the moment … perhaps enough so that he could indulge his curiosity. He put on an air of polite interest and nodded toward the mythal stone. “Your work on the mythal seems to be proceeding well. I can see the progress since my last visit here.”

“As it turns out, we have need of it,” Dresimil replied.

“Need of it?” Jack asked. “But the mythal was abandoned thousands of years ago, was it not?”

Dresimil shrugged. “It was. But that is not what I wished to speak to you about, Jack.”

Jack suppressed a frown of disappointment. He’d hoped that Dresimil might volunteer more than that. Now his curiosity was indeed whetted, but clearly it wouldn’t be wise to pry too deeply. Why did the dark elves need the old mythal? Doubtless they had some plot in mind, perhaps against the surface world, but what was it? “How may I be of service?”

“Tell me more about the woman we found petrified alongside you,” the marquise said. “Myrkyssa Jelan, was that her name?”

“Your recollection is accurate. She styled herself the Warlord of the Vast. In the Year of the Tankard-thirteen seventy-she appeared in the passes of the eastern mountains at the head of a formidable army, and ravaged much of the Vast for the better part of a year before setting siege to Raven’s Bluff. She had the very curious characteristic of being immune to magic.”

“Immune?” Jaeren asked sharply. “How so?”

Jack frowned. “Magic simply … wasn’t for her. No divination could find her, no battle spell could harm her, and in turn she could not touch or wield magic at all. She told me once that it was a generations-old curse upon her family, one that she was anxious to break.”

The drow exchanged silent glances. “Continue,” said Dresimil.

“Of course. Her horde laid siege to Raven’s Bluff. The Ravenaar army marched out to meet her, and defeated her forces in a great battle.” Jack paused, organizing his thoughts. “Jelan escaped the destruction of her army, and for many months afterward the city officials searched far and wide for her. It was assumed that she’d died unmarked in the battle, or retreated back to her strongholds in the wild lands far to the east.

“Unfortunately, neither hope proved well-founded. Myrkyssa Jelan infiltrated Raven’s Bluff in disguise. She posed as the last surviving member of the Thoden family, and rose to become the city’s Lady Mayor after the old lord mayor resigned. No one suspected her, because as the Warlord no one had ever seen her face.” Jack offered a small shrug. “I came to know her in the aptly named Year of Wild Magic, thirteen seventy-two. While she was Lady Mayor, she also masqueraded as a lawless adventurer called Elana. I suppose she found a second identity as a criminal useful for engaging in plots and intrigues that would be unseemly for a civic official. In her guise as Elana, she conspired to seize control of the city. But her ultimate goal was to gain access to this mythal; she believed she could employ its magic to break her family’s curse.”

“Resourceful,” Jaeren observed.

Jack nodded. “I think it would be fair to say that Myrkyssa Jelan was the most ambitious, resourceful, and resolute person I have ever met. She was ruthless, but she also possessed a peculiar sense of personal honor-something she brought with her from her time in the East, I suppose. I was lucky to defeat her.” He hesitated, wondering how far he could push this moment of amiability, before adding, “Why do you ask?”

Dresimil pursed her lips in displeasure. “She escaped this morning.”

“Escaped? But she was a statue.”

“It seems that was not a permanent condition,” Jezzryd answered. “The effect wore off, and she returned to life a few hours ago. Our guards failed to subdue her.”

There was likely a good story in that simple turn of phrase, Jack reflected. How many injuries and how much mayhem were entailed by a failure to subdue Myrkyssa Jelan? “She is a formidable blademaster,” he agreed.

“True enough, but as you just described, no magic could touch her,” said Jezzryd. “The most powerful spells of our mages and priests left her completely unscathed. Yet you say that you entombed her in a magical prison when you defeated her a hundred years ago.”

“I believe I caught her in a rare moment of vulnerability, Lord Jezzryd. When I confronted her here, she was almost finished with the ritual that would restore her ability to wield magic-and to be affected by it, too, I would guess.” Jack rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It seems that the ritual was not quite completed, or did not have the effects she anticipated. Perhaps her native unmagic simply took some time to reassert itself?”

The drow wizard glanced at his sister and offered a slight shrug as if to say that he saw no reason to doubt Jack’s explanation. Dresimil thought a moment, and then addressed Jack again. “What do you think she will do now that she is free?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t say,” said Jack. “She might seek to try her ritual again, but now that your mythal is no longer deserted, that would seem difficult. I suppose she’ll return to the surface world, discover that she has been entombed for a century, and make the best of the situation. If the people of Raven’s Bluff have forgotten her, they may have just gained a determined new enemy they know nothing about.”

“Did she have a stronghold or base of any kind? Any familiar haunts?”

“She used a ship in the city’s harbor as her headquarters, but that must be long gone by now.” Jack shrugged. “In her guise as Amber Lynn Thoden, she resided at Thoden Manor.”

The dark elves conferred silently again. After a moment, Dresimil made a languid gesture of dismissal. “Thank you, Jack. You may return to your duties in the fields.”

The thought of returning to the rothe fields sparked a sudden rush of panic in Jack. “If you are concerned about Myrkyssa Jelan, I may be able to assist you,” he said quickly. “No scrying-magic you attempt can discover her. If you want her found, you will need to send someone who knows her appearance well enough to see through the disguises she may adopt.”

The noblewoman shrugged. “I doubt that I have much to fear from Myrkyssa Jelan,” she replied. “Our purposes do not intersect; I am content to let her go her way, so long as she stays out of mine. But if that changes, Jack, then I will know where to find you.” She motioned again to the waiting guards.

Jack ground his teeth in frustration, but he didn’t dare to press her any more. “I am, quite literally, my lady’s servant,” he replied with a bow. He nodded to Jezzryd and Jaeren, and allowed the guards to lead him back to the pastures.