Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

VI

Success is sweet! The shadows are kind! Success sets the heart to beat-beat-beat!

The treasure is heavy. Oh, the treasure is heavy. But that’s the price of great success!

Or so Glathfrap tells himself. He doesn’t have much experience with great success. None of the Jewel-Eyed Folk do, trapped as they are between the big creatures that come down from the daylight to smash and slay and loot, and the even-worse things that lurk below.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small, they are few, and they hide to stay alive.

But they are quick.

Today, Glathfrap reached from the shadows as the big creatures lowered the food basket from the too-bright world above. Today, Glathfrap was quick!

Now he rolls his prize along a scuttleway of the Jewel-Eyed Folk: a jar of wine almost as big as himself. He can hear it sloshing, would love to taste it, to share it, but there is an even more pressing need.

He will take the wine to a cold place, a place of power, where the Jewel-Eyed Folk fear to linger. Glathfrap will spill the wine there as an offering.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small. They are few. They do not now have a god.

But if they give offerings, they will gain favors.

Offering by offering, they will raise a god of their own. And then the shadows will be kind to them.

Oh yes. So very kind indeed.

VII

You don’t need to be as exquisitely careful with a little spell for near-vicinity teleportation as you do with a spell for traveling through time.

You don’t. You just don’t. Why would you? The logic just makes sense. You don’t! In any case, Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, doesn’t have the full use of his limbs or his usual vocalizations to work any corrections, so ... it has to be fine! It’s all fine. The plan is working. That’s what his plans do, even if they sometimes meander. Lots of good things meander. It is generally agreed that rivers are good things. Everyone loves them and they do very little except meander. So.

Anthar-Kaladon has recently moved again, into a new wall, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built forty or forty-five centuries ago, and he tells himself that he is not worrying, he is merely dissecting the theoretical boundaries of any potential difficulties for his own amusement while his plan meanders to its inevitable triumph. He can set aside the disheartening suspicion that he might have accidentally inverted himself once or twice during his teleportations, which would mean that his current direction of progress might not be progress at all. However, that would be bad, which of course means it can’t be happening. Likewise, that minute burning thread of apprehension that he might now coexist simultaneously with several versions of himself, separated by just a few yards of dirt and stone, moving in separate directions both physically and temporally, well, that is also best described as mere conjecture. What a disaster that would indicate! Unthinkable.

Something scuttles nearby. Goblins. Not conjecture. Sadly thinkable. Goblins for sure. Stack them up with the petty undead, the gleam-snakes, the Glass Devil spiders, and the freebooters from the surface. This labyrinth will need a good cleaning when he sets himself loose, a good cleaning for-

Anthar-Kaladon’s head is wet.

At first, he thinks he is mistaken. Then he merely hopes he is mistaken. But no, his head is definitely wet.

Someone has poured wine into the cracks and crevices of the floor above. The wine is trickling down upon his immobile form.

Why ... why would the goblins do that? Of all things, why would they pour wine on him? This indignity is getting out of hand.

Anthar-Kaladon continues intoning his next teleportation spell. Oh, let it take him somewhere useful this time!