The rats had not gotten to the body yet. Deep in its guts, the last of its body heat cooled. It still smelled like fresh meat and blood, and not so different from slaughter time at the market. Aside from stumbling across it in the alleyway, the body was actually quite unremarkable. It wasn’t the first time Aestith had seen death. Drow lived with death as a lizard lived with its scales.
Aestith’Rix was named after a dragon, not because his mother had particularly high hopes for him, but because the dragon Aesdondia was recently slain and it was the first thing on her mind. The dragon had taken up residence outside a coveted surface trade route the Tith'Rix family controlled, and the creature had nearly been the cause of financial disaster. It was a small wonder she would name a boy after it.
As much as one named a boy, anyway. Male drow were so disposable, so totally belonging as property to their house, that they were not given a name at birth, and only some variation of their family name.
Male drow often went by a nickname of some kind, though the only real variation of his was “Aestith” or “Aes”. The singular syllable was actually incredibly common in Enainsi, so he used the first part of his name instead.
The commonality of the name, coupled with it being the first thing to come to Almalza’s mind when prompted, made it a passive insult. Though, being the only male in the household and the youngest after six sisters--seven if you counted the dead one--he often endured more than the careless slight of his name, given to him a full two turns of the Enainsi waterclock after his birth during his Consecration ceremony. It was the last thing she would ever give him freely.
He may have fallen into a neglected obscurity, except that Jaele thought of him as a small, interactive doll. By the time he had passed from infant to toddler, she had grown a sort of fondness for him in the way that one might covet their own possessions. His mother died in childbirth with another set of twins when he was eight. Almalza Tith'Rix had desperately wanted eight daughters, though it had not been the goddess’s will; the twins were fused together at the stomach, though female. Small wonder it had torn their mother open so. The twins were never returned from the clergy’s hands.
Aestith had overheard someone comment, once, that Almalza Tith'Rix should not have been “greedy”, and it was therefore her own fault she and her twin daughters were dead.
When he was twelve, he discovered that they had attempted a separation of the conjoined twins, met with catastrophic failure: One died immediately and the next died a few bells later. By then, he was so detached from it that it hardly mattered to him.
Aestith sighed and rose to his feet. He had best tell a slave to do something with the body. If left there, it would stink and attract flies. He stepped around it.
He didn’t recognize the body, but then, why would he? Enainsi boasted around forty thousand drow elves here. It wasn’t impossible that Aestith didn’t know him.
The corpse’s hair was gray with years, as was the way of males. Even his clothes were unremarkable--old and plain but well-kept. Could be the upper crust trying to blend in, or the burnt bottom trying to appear presentable. If there had been anything identifiable, it was long gone--yet they had left the face, frozen in painful anguish, the red of rage bleeding from his eyes like the blood from his stomach. Of course, drow wouldn’t concern themselves with petty matters of policing and justice. The real problem was that someone had just left it there.
Aestith wondered, Why? The man had been gutted. That wasn’t a self-defense wound, and it wasn’t an accident. It would have been quite messy and would involve a fair amount of noise if the man were conscious through it. By the expression frozen on the man’s face, he had been. Aestith stopped and looked back. Was someone practicing hepatoscopy? He turned, his thoughts on divination and tarot cards, other silly things he held no truck with, but that didn’t mean no one did. Maybe they even learned something.
He paced around the body curiously. There were no signs of struggle, not here anyway, and not enough blood. Could it have been dumped here? Why? He nudged the dead man’s head with the toe of his boot. The head rolled like a rusted pivot. He tilted his head in dim imitation, or mockery. The body was too cold for him to see much nuance about it in the infrared spectrum. He knelt and lifted a palm, a small light dancing over his fingertips. The low light illuminated it--there on the back of his neck. Only the very wealthy branded slaves like that, because it decreased their resale value.
Of course, there were no drow slaves in Enainsi.
He nudged the hair out of the way. The hair was another piece of the puzzle--the body’s hair was slightly too long to be a slave. Had he been freed? Curious--males were rarely freed. The brand on the back of his neck was a circular serpent with a web in the center, not a House crest but a merchant’s seal. There was a single, healed line slashed through it. He had indeed been freed. Somehow, he had gained the favor of his mistress enough for her to grant him freedom.
A frown graced his lips. A smuggler for Innis? He glanced again at the wound and rose. The light guttered out as he dropped his palm. Territory dispute. This had been carried from somewhere else as a message, dumped where it would be found. He wondered if it came from Tith'Rix, or another syndicate.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, more because it was comfortable than because it was cold. Enainsi was too hot all year around for how much he wore, let alone this time of year when the lava flows were thickening.
He turned from the body, satisfied at the mystery solved.
The small, warm shape of a goblin hobbled toward him. A cart rolled behind it. He relaxed. Someone had already found the body. Another lurched after it, followed by a third. They saw him, looked first at his butchered hair then over the cut of his clothes that bespoke of money if not station, and moved the cart to one side, slowly. Aestith didn’t care enough to be offended at their lack of haste; it simply wasn’t worth the effort. That sort of thing mattered to his sisters--Aestith privately thought they could be over-sensitive.
The city bell sounded, a deep, resonant chime, singular to signify that twenty-four candlemarks had passed. He looked up automatically, but he wouldn’t be able to see the huge waterclock from the alley, dripping slowly at one drop per second until the bell chimed, then the water would slosh and wait for the next to be filled. When ten were full, the wheel would turn and complete a “turn”. Those were counted into “cycles”, which denoted the seasons and thus years. He had used to like to watch it when he was younger. He could just barely see it turn from the roof of his family home, which was accessible to an adventurous if foolhardy child.
A fourth goblin, this one hunched and sitting at the mouth of the alley, called, “Drow elf.” Its voice grated over his ears like gravel.
He wondered what could have possibly inspired it to draw attention to itself. Amused, he stilled.
It seemed to creak when it moved, old bones and overgrown scales rubbing against one another. The slave motioned with crooked fingers then gestured to the carved stone tiles. “Spit. Goblin read fortune.”
He almost laughed. “Does anyone actually do that?”
It didn’t seem to have heard him. It continued, “Your fortune cloudy. More clear with spit.”
He tilted his head. “What?”
“Need spit. Clear,” it insisted. It gestured. “Is hiding in layers.”
The blood drained from his face and his chest tightened. It was an effort to keep from running the rest of the way home.
#
Jaele strolled down the hall, calling “Aestith” as if she were calling some beast of burden. Her voice rolled over the hard “a” sound of the first syllable, and drawled out the soft “i”, which made the last consonant hiss.
Her heels clicked on the diamond-patterned mosaic on the floor. Above, a pattern of webs arched over the ceiling. Flecks of mica gave them movement, made them glisten and catch the light from the luminescent lichen that lent the carvings of water currents the illusion of flowing. It was Amalette’s work, part of some remodel dozens of years ago. Haeltania had commented, She was going through a phase. She said the last word as if it were an unexpectedly sour taste on her tongue.
Aestith and Jaele were the only two still with milk names, and nearly of an age as far as drow elves were concerned, which was rare enough to occasionally raise an eyebrow or give some weight to the rumors about Almalza. More rare, they more than likely shared the same sire. Aestith had never met the man, but apparently, Almalza had favored him until Aestith’s birth, and his mother had been so infuriated to have a boy that she had probably had him killed. At the least, Kyandan was never seen again. Before Aestith could remember, he had had a bone earring in his right ear that was likely Kyandan, a custom among Enainsine drow to simultaneously honor the dead and to bind them to the living to protect them. It was traditional to wear as jewelry the bones of family, sometimes friends. It was said that if you tried to wear the bones of one you had wronged, it would lead the wearer to ruin. Alleged innocence was “proven” by gladly wearing the bones of the deceased. He wondered how many people had the items duplicated and swapped with the bones of something else that didn’t matter to show appearances.
Aestith half-fell out of the alcove he had been trying to sleep in with a groan. True sleep was getting more difficult as he aged--something Jaele had politely informed him was completely normal, and “sleeping was infantile”. He knuckled one eye, striding toward her. “Yes, sister?”
She grinned. “That’s where you’ve hidden yourself?” She inclined her head. Some of her white hair shifted to reveal the stud on her own ear that was likely Kyandan. Being female, she had a full ring of their mother’s bone. He just had the extra stud in his upper ear. “Must you sleep so often?”
Aestith was under the inclination that he was actually less likely to be killed in his sleep. For one, it was difficult to offend someone from a comatose pose and most other men he encountered interpreted a sleepy, doe-eyed youth as so non-threatening as to be ignored rather than viewed as a potential rival. For two, his sisters most likely to murder him for perceived misgivings held to a superstition that if you’re going to kill a family member, you need to see their eyes first--and his were often firmly shut. And the third reason, he would rather die in his sleep.
He kept his head appropriately down when addressing any woman, but with Jaele, he kept his head more away than down, staring over her right shoulder to some patch of air behind her. She actually preferred to see his face. It wasn’t, for her part, familiarity or fondness exactly; she was good at reading faces so preferred to actually see them. Aestith preferred to watch a person’s hands, or their feet--either could foretell the other’s actions, and betray their mood.
“Sorry,” he apologized automatically. He must have said it a dozen times a bell--I’m sorry. Over and over. I’m sorry for existing. I apologize that I’m an inconvenience. I’m sorry. He hated having to apologize; it admitted fault, and he knew he should be striving for perfection. He’d never be perfect. He gave a lopsided grin. “But if I don’t regularly cocoon myself, how might I turn into a moth?” The self-deprecating joke implied he’d never be a spider, but ordinarily, any joke making a mockery of insects and particularly moths usually went over well with any Enainsine drow.
“You’re fucking weird, Aestith,” she mused.
That, too, was part of the game to him--not the game consisting of blood and daggers and social status, but his game primarily concerned with staying alive. Be non-threatening. Be invisible. Let no one take you seriously. He had seen what happened when someone was taken too seriously and too visibly.
He quirked an eyebrow. “‘Weird’, eh? I usually just refer to it as my left hand.”
It had the desired effect; she snorted a short laugh. “Ah, hell, Aes.” She straightened with a toss of her head. “I meant to say, come with me to the market.”
You mean you want a bodyguard. Someone who would die for you if needed, who you trusted indefinitely. And he would die for Jaele--the alternative would be facing his other sisters if she died and he didn’t. Worse, she knew it. He made a face anyway, as if the thought of being drug to the market caused him physical pain, then his slender shoulders sagged dramatically in defeat. He took a breath for another flippant remark, then stilled at the sound of thin heels strutting down the hall. He stepped to one side. Jaele stepped with him, but she moved as if she had simply lost interest in being in the middle of the hall.
Haeltania passed them. He could joke with Jaele to little repercussion, but Haeltania would interpret it as insubordination. Haeltania wasn’t likely to kill him outright--that would leave a body and he might piss and shit himself when he died, but she may do other things. There were things worse than death, and Haeltania kept many of them in small jars.
Yet silence was suspicious. He said instead, “Something of interest at the market?”
Haeltania stopped. “You’re going out, Jaele? To which market?” She ran over the first consonant as if to remind Jaele of some personal failing, as if Jaele had chosen her milk name.
Haeltania was suspicious. Aestith said, “Do you want us to get you something?”
Her hand rose and she slapped him as casually as someone might swat a fly. The gem-studded ring on her hand that was Almalza’s bone sliced into his cheek and he flinched. “When two women are speaking, you will speak when directed, male.”
Aestith looked down without tending to his cheek. Jaele turned toward her elder sister with a smile so sweet Aestith could feel his teeth rot from where he stood. Jaele idly twisted a finger in one long red-blonde curl. “Yes. I fear if I let these atrocious roots grow in any longer, I’ll lose my mind.” Which implied they were going to the third floor of Enainsi, the Commons Market, where the widest variety of dyes and powders were.
Haeltania’s painted lips pulled in a sneer. Aestith thought, but would never say aloud, that Haeltania was jealous of Jaele’s curls; Haeltania would spend hours curling her long hair, and Jaele’s did it naturally, like Aestith’s. “Of course.” She continued down the hall.
Jaele turned toward Aestith. He watched Haeltania disappear down a twist in the hall. Her shadow did not. His eyes flicked back toward Jaele. He signed, She’s listening. “Oh?” his voice took on a faint teasing note. “We’re going up an entire floor to the market for your hair?”
She tossed her head of pale red curls. The strawberry blonde made her recognizable, and people remembered her. It also meant that if she didn’t want to be recognizable, covering the red with a wig or white ash suddenly made her invisible. Everyone else just thought she was silly. “Are you implying that everything isn’t about my hair?” She signed, I need you to do something.
He groaned aloud. “Of course it is. Anything less is a tragedy.”
“One candlemark--and wash yourself up.” Pickpocket Namika Walerin.
House Innis again. The Innis family were barely even competing with Tith'Rix in their primary market. Why would they be so bold? It was like attacking archers with slings. He groaned internally, but he smiled pleasantly. Blood dried along his cheekbone. “Anything you say, Jaele.” He paused. Nobles kept their children under lock and key until they could defend themselves as adults; commoners had a more free-range perspective as they lacked the luxuries this sort of upbringing required, but sometimes his sisters didn’t like the idea of him, at a mere 14, leaving the house on his own. “I already mentioned it to Amalette, but I discovered a gutted Innis runner, about a quarter mark to the last bell.”
She raised an eyebrow. Lips pulled into a faint smirk. “Did you now?” she asked, wide-eyed and innocent. “Well, what a turn of misfortune for them.”
She walked past him in a rolling gait a book could balance on. She had spent a half year learning how to walk without bobbing up and down, because she got it into her head that it was more poised and dignified; she wasn’t wrong. It was also, she said, easier to shoot a target if she walked smoothly.
His cheek stung, but it had only bled a drop. She hadn’t hit him hard enough for it to swell, like Descaronan or Deserandian could so effortlessly.
He darted off to the kitchen, yawning. The cook, a relatively fat foreign slave, chopped vegetables. Virabel said you can’t trust a skinny cook. The human was expensive, and highly prized.
“Aestith--thought you sleep now,” the cook said in his broken accent. He’d likely never get a complete grip on the language. The cook had not known any Undercommon before he had been captured and he often tripped over words or mangled pronunciations.
The bread smelled baked. Aestith went to the oven by the wide door. He pulled the oven door open, the heat washing over him to expel from the ajar door to the garden. He picked up the tray and the cook flinched to watch him do it without a rag. He turned and set the hot tray down on a towel. He shouldered the door closed, drawing the lock back in place. He swiped a bead of sweat from his pimpled brow. His fingertips were warm, but not burned--he had burned them so many times, he had more or less lost feeling in them. He helped assemble the meal, placing it on the service trolley. He took the trays to each of his sisters in the dining room, serving Virabel first, and down the line. They barely looked at him, except for Haeltania, who curled her painted lips at his presence. He left the women and took the trolley back to the kitchen, trying to fight a yawn.
He took one of the last buns and slipped out the kitchen door into the yard--he wasn’t allowed to come and go through the front without an escort anyway, but he liked the lichen garden. Statues of spiders and female drow dotted it--allegedly, they would animate if under attack, but he didn’t know if that were true. He ate fast enough that one of his sisters would have reprimanded him, told him to try tasting his food before he “unhinged his jaw like a serpent and swallowed it”.
Brushing breadcrumbs from his fingers, he wandered to the wall and glanced back at the house. No faces lingered near the windows, so he gripped the old stone. Bare feet scrambled over the stone, finding purchase in small divots and worn shelves. He heaved himself over the side and dropped, landing on all fours in the dry waterbed. He skidded down the sharp slope and scaled the ridged wall on the other side.
He whistled once, then waited, crouched in a recess by one of the inane statues. The gravel crunched under callused feet, a shadow fell and Aestith scooted over for Nier.
Sweat streaked the other boy’s skin and his hands shook, but he pulled the book from his tunic, glancing back at his own house. His voice was dry and raspy as he spoke, “I think I found it.” Aestith leaned over the book as Izelxaenier thumbed through the vellum pages. He stopped and tapped the page. “Here.”
Aestith looked at the diagram, then thumbed to a different page to study a woodcut. He flipped to another, biting his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is it really…”
Nier stared at him. “I don’t know. I’ve just seen drawings.” He made a face. “Can’t you ask Jaele?”
Aestith paled at the thought. He shook his head, what was left of his oleaginous curls bouncing. “No.” He swallowed. If he asked about it, would she suspect? Would she view him as a threat, or a freak? Telling Nier had been a risk, but the scholarly family had a library Aestith would have given a testicle just to see.
“If the goddess saw fit to give you this gift, shouldn’t you be proud of it?”
Nier would never last, Aestith realized. He’d die. Strong, but naive. Too logical. He had no grasp of family politics or social status. Nier had fewer siblings though, so maybe it just wouldn’t occur to him.
Aestith didn’t know if it were a gift, or a curse. It felt like a curse. He was scared, every bell, that someone would find out. He was scared when he bathed and dressed, bundling in layers to hide himself. He wore too much, and he worried that someone would notice the way he dressed, or that he sweat yet did not remove a layer. He had thought, initially, that he was only gaining weight, eating too much or something. Wrong, dead wrong.
“I don’t know that it’s a gift. What else causes things like this?”
“The Spellplague is going on right now.”
Aestith glared. “Next you’ll suggest the Masked Lord, since he has something vaguely to do with deformity.” They said that more males than females were deformed, and it was that deity’s influence as a deformed male that did it. And so ended all of Aestith’s knowledge of the cult.
He did not even smile. “I have to go,” the other boy said, snatching the book back. Nier’s lips twisted and he muttered an apology before he dashed back down the street.
Aestith waited half a minute, then made the arduous climb back down and scrambled again over the garden wall. In his sparse room, he checked that he was alone, then locked the door. He pulled the basin close to the closet and half-hid inside it before he stripped off the layers of clothes.
If his hair had been longer, washing it in the basin would have been more difficult, but he had taken a knife to it some time back, hacking at it ritualistically. Destroying something that had taken so long to grow had felt satisfying at the time. If it were long enough, he would have done it again.
Haeltania had sneered when she saw it, said it was “fitting”. Aestith hadn’t known what she meant, but Jaele told him and he had almost wished she hadn’t; before a decade-long heatwave, it had been a custom in Enainsi that someone’s hair depicted their rank. A shaved head had meant punishment of some kind, and butchered hair, like his, meant servitude. Now, it was just a means of shaming someone fallen in rank, which he hadn’t cared as much about. As such, wearing one’s hair down to show off rank was the custom, and curly hair, like his, often depicted lowborn birth. When the temperatures, already frequently too warm, rose to stifling, hairstyles changed to keep hair off the neck and curly hair became more popular, but it didn’t stop the sweat. Yet still, some things persisted; you could not grow your hair beyond a particular length, though it was agreeable if it were shorter.
His chest was tender. It ached to the touch when he washed it, stifling a wave of self-disgust. Why would his body do this to him?
You can be betrayed by friends or family or your own people, but no one expects to be betrayed by their own body. The hole he could live with, almost. It wasn’t noticeable and relatively easy to hide; it was just a small hole that fit neatly behind his balls. It had originally been closed over with a thin layer of skin. A couple years ago, he had found that there seemed to be a hollow there and if he pushed against it, he could dig his fingers in a bit--which improved his self-attentions. He had broken the skin. Repeated poking at it and examining himself with a small brass mirror borrowed without permission from Jaele’s dresser proved that not only had it bled only a little and hadn’t hurt, there was a hollow there. He hadn’t known what it was, but he couldn’t think of a way to explain himself to his sisters, so had instead opted to ignore it. Hiding that had been as easy as declining using the communal bath, which his sisters attributed to him being a teenage boy.
This new thing was more difficult. He cupped the small breasts, pushing them flat as if it could make them sink back into his chest, but the fat and muscle would only compress so much. For how long could he hide this?
He needed a long-term plan, but how? Descaronan wrapped her breasts with strips of fabric to bind them to herself, to keep from getting smacked in the face with them when she ran. Envious no doubt, Haeltania had snidely remarked to Amalette where Aestith overheard, She practically has udders. Amalette had snickered.
That was what Aestith did, but for different reasons.
Aestith’s sisters had raised him, for Almalza certainly wanted nothing to do with him. If she saw him at all, it was to either beat him or she would ignore him--the latter was worse; he was used to the beatings. A lashing meant they had not forgotten him, so when he was small, he often had to act out so that one of his sisters would remember that he existed. It was so much worse when they forgot. When he got a bit older, though, he avoided crossing them, not to avoid the lash, per se, but to avoid his own embarrassment. He liked the way the pain felt.
He touched the scar along his left breast, curved under it. He had even come at the last cut, when the pain was exquisite and ecstatic, his world going white-hot with agony and blood. He hadn’t tried the pointless exercise of cutting them off again. Open wounds could draw unwanted attention.
When he washed, he bound them, then layered on clothes until the bumps were hardly noticeable.
What the hell was wrong with him that this was happening? Or was something right? If he were turning into a woman somehow, why weren’t the lesser set of genitals disappearing?
He didn’t know what to do. Was he caught somewhere between a man and a woman? What did that mean? The deformed at birth were killed. Had some sorcerer cursed him, thought it might be funny? It couldn’t be from birth; his family, his mother, his sisters, had all seen him naked as a child, so surely at least one of them would have noticed if something were not right. Had he truly evaded seven pairs of eyes his whole life? Eight, he amended, for he had to count himself in that number too.
He met Jaele in the foyer. Her lips pulled into a dissatisfied frown, but she wasn’t looking at him. She glanced up at his approach. “We must go talk to one of our caravan drivers.” She sighed. “Apparently, raiders have been swarming about them like flies on shit.” She spun one finger in the air disdainfully, in vague mimicry of a fly buzzing.
He followed her out the door. “Doesn’t Virabel usually see to that kind of thing?”
She tilted her head. “Yes, but since we’re happening by, might as well. Let’s do that first.”
He consented to this, both because he didn’t really have much of an option and because it hardly mattered. Be non-threatening, be invisible, and above all, be useful.
“So long as I’m back in time to make pie,” he mused.
She brightened. “Oh, what sort?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Cottage pie. I need to use some of the leftovers in the kitchen.”
“I really don’t know how you do it, Aestith. I’d be useless in a kitchen.”
He nodded dimly as he fell into step behind her. All you had to do was follow directions. There was a recipe book in the library, and no one had expressly told him not to read it, so he had read it. Still, he thought it just as well that his sisters considered domestic duties to be far below their station; it made him useful. Most of the men and boys he knew bought into the, frankly short-sighted, social paradigm that you had to be useful militarily to be considered of worth. He saw no reason he couldn’t have a secondary skill or two, in the event of horrifying disfigurement. Those skills should be something everyone can approve of--and cooking and baking came with a simple set of directions.
Jaele had once told him that he had been born dead. He had little desire to experience death a second time and planned to put that off for as long as possible.
He stayed close behind Jaele on the way to the office, keeping his head down. No reason to ever stand out, to ever be noticed. He did as much as he could to wear nothing that could catch the eye, to appear as normal as possible. The fact was, he looked ordinary, if it were only his face. He looked properly his age with spotty skin and greasy hair, not particularly masculine but not erring to feminine either and wholly unremarkable. People tended to forget what he looked like. His sisters only recognized him because they had seen him grow into the forgettable face. If only his body would follow suit!
Eyes went over him as if he weren’t there. Even other men, always alert for potential threats to their station, glossed over him. People recognized Jaele, but not her curious tagalong who had seam ripped and butchered any clothing he had so not even that was worth noticing. He wished that there was a standard uniform he could wear, just to look more basic.
He told himself that, in theory, when he was finished with training in a few dozen years, there would be, more or less, a standard military-esque outfit, in the form of armor or a robe. The trouble was, he didn’t think he would survive after the reward of graduation. Someone with higher designs than Nier would, ultimately, see him naked. The academies had dormitories--how under the earth might he hide? Sweat trickled between his shoulder blades. His throat suddenly felt dry. He had only a handful of years to think of a plan.
Cut them off. Sew it up. Couldn’t hurt that bad. Had to be better than dying.
Run?
Suicide, he mused. Always an option. He liked to keep his options open, and there were so many possibilities with suicide. Trouble was, he wanted to live, but if he had to die, he’d prefer it if it were entirely on his terms.
Swallowing anything in one of the bottles in Haeltania’s room would kill him. And if it didn’t, she certainly would after hearing that he swallowed something of hers. He had tried the passive suicide of starvation before, but after about two turns of it, he had had hallucinations and Jaele noticed. Being noticed was worse. When you drew attention, people asked questions.
He scratched at one of the small scabs on his arm. Well, if he just cut down lower and deeper next time with the razor, maybe that would do it. He made a face. No, use a knife, you idiot.
But that still left the problem of dying. He didn’t want to die, not really. It just seemed preferable to sacrifice. They said that if you were sacrificed after Consecration, your cycle of life was ended forever. He wouldn’t get another chance. If he could just choose how and when, that gave him some modicum of power over his life. It would give him at least the ability to go back into the cycle. It was like when he carved out scars in his arm; it was just something small he had a choice over. Or when he didn’t eat.
Die or run, Aestith--what’ll it be?
He didn’t like the idea of running either; it felt cowardly--anyway, you can only run so far from your problems when your main problem is yourself.
That left bodily mutilation.
“Aestith?”
He lifted his head. “Hm?”
“You had a funny expression on your face.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “I usually do.”
Her lips split in a sardonic grin. “You think yourself so humorous.”
He smirked, then someone passed and he looked back down. She stepped into the stone building. Everything was stone on this level of the city. Stone, sometimes clay bricks, sometimes giant mushrooms. He had seen surface wood once or twice in small items--expensive imported stuff that tended toward rot and burned easily. Marble was used more frequently in the upperclass levels, further from the surface.
He shadowed Jaele. She stopped at the clerk’s soapstone desk, then was pointed to another room. She signed, Books.
He broke from her and went up the stairs to see their bookkeeper, Quin. Aestith had met him once or twice before. The man seemed to think that the world should--and, more importantly could--be organized into neat little numbers and figures, reducing the struggle of life to nothing more than a little tick mark in a box or an innocuous number in a ledger.
Quin sat at a desk with an expression as if the abacus he used was an instrument of torture. Without looking up, he said, “You can’t come in here.”
Aestith stilled. “May I borrow the most recent account ledger, then? Jaele requested that I am to review it while we’re here.”
His head rose slowly. Quin searched Aestith’s face for a memory of who he was, then hesitated. Quin didn’t recognize him, but he had mentioned Jaele. Disappointing the Tith'Rix family never went well for their workers. Quin had to weigh the chances that Aestith actually belonged here, or were a spy. Were he a spy, he looked remarkably similar to the Tith'Rix family.
Perhaps coming to the conclusion that if Aestith didn’t belong here someone else would have noticed, the clerk said, “There.” He pointed, as if Aestith were already ripping out fingernails. Aestith lifted the book from the top of the file cabinet and hurried out of his office before the clerk changed his mind. Aestith plopped down on a bench just outside it, tallying sums in his head, looking for discrepancies, particularly with the caravan Dark Carnival. Amalette had given many of them names from books or stories, and Aestith didn’t know the origin of half of them.
On the floor below the balcony, Jaele walked with the caravan driver and disappeared around a corner. He flipped a page, then looked up when she rounded the corner again. He waited another half minute, then closed the book and slipped it back in the office. He hurried down the stairs and met her at the door.
They walked outside. “And?” she said.
He frowned, then looked around the street. He whispered, “They only report losses when Virabel oversees the route.” He had found similar patterns amidst the other attacked caravans, but it was slightly meaningless; Virabel was the matriarch and most of the routes were hers.
“Virabel?” she said with a jerk of her head. Both looked quickly around, then she frowned. “Thus far, they have yet to make any real connections. The suspicion is merely that it’s bandits and nothing more.”
His brow wrinkled. The caravans were not consistently on the same roads. Bad luck?
They walked mostly in silence to the Falls Market. The twin waterfalls cascaded into a clear pool of water that cooled the air around it. Between the waterfalls stood an ancient statue of a woman wielding a spear chiseled from the rock around her. Children of nearby merchant houses played in the pool. Aestith had used to do it himself when he was their age.
The real estate closest to the pool was the most sought after. Heavy spices hung in the air with the incense burning at the shrines and mingled with cooking food from small stalls. Fabrics could be acquired here and there were stalls for small leathergoods carted from the Commons by slaves. The Falls slave market was an odd mix of brutish creatures and more delicate slaves, though the former were generally regarded as visually unsavory if a necessity and were located further away from the central area.
Jaele moved toward the water, nearer to the jewelry shops, and he slipped away to hunt down his quarry. Pickpocketing the handmaid was actually fairly easy--too easy; it worried him.
He slipped away to a quiet corner, hidden from view, to open the letter. He scanned the words on the page, then cursed.
Gibberish. It’s Elven gibberish. Most of these weren’t words, or if they were, they were so badly misspelled that they weren’t. He didn’t have time to copy it and he still had to reseal the letter.
He raked his hand through his hair. Shit.
If he were to look only at the format, though, it was a bulleted list and a longer series of what might be instructions, like a recipe.
He looked at the numbers again. He went through recipes in his head, trying to match the amounts. It was a recipe for lichen bread. Bread--did that mean something? The lichen shipments.
Something about the words…
The misspellings. They weren’t in Elvish. If he translated the words and letters to Undercommon, the misspellings spelled out an abbreviated date and if you were generous, a location but written in nautical terms--which was something he knew about because Amalette had read him a book with some pirate or other in it while he combed her hair when he was younger. He would have to look up what it meant, but perhaps Quin was right about something--the marrow of the world could indeed boil down to a broth of numbers.
Heart pounding, he resealed the letter with a basic fire spell to melt the wax--wizardry had to be good for something--then blew on it to cool it. He went back into the market and slipped the “recipe” back into her bag. That one was more difficult.
He spied Jaele poking around in a market stall. She stepped into the building. He wandered inside, where he was mostly ignored. The oil lanterns in the shop, to illuminate the colors, gave him headaches, but he was used to the lighting; he spent so much time reading. Wearing color was an opulent display of wealth. It meant you could afford to have lights to see it and that you didn’t care about being temporarily dark-blind if you stepped away from it, to say nothing of the cost of imported dyes and textiles. It was practical for drow to wear black; matching skin tone and undertone was difficult otherwise, and matching colors in infrared almost impossible. Those with the means in Enainsi often wore white--it looked stunning on a dark complexion or made someone with grey skin look darker; white was also difficult to keep white, especially lace.
He walked to her, tapped her once on the wrist, then started out. She called, “Wait--what do you think?”
He turned back. He swore Jaele was half color-blind. He started to raise his hand to point, then his eyes slid slowly toward the shopkeeper. “Neither. The blue one would match one of your gowns, but you already possess a matching piece at home--and the other is glass. It must have been placed there by mistake.” His lip curled into a partial sneer, for the watching shopkeep’s benefit.
She started to look at the shopkeep. He stepped carefully into her line of vision, his back to the man. He mouthed, Something is going on.
“Oh, you’re right of course. I love the color, but I probably have far too much of it.” She set down both pieces, in the wrong place. They moved away, but not out the door. He had a personal investment in keeping Jaele alive; not only did he like Jaele, she was the only one out of his six living sisters who didn’t view him entirely as disposable. He held no illusions that she wouldn’t throw him into the web if it were deemed necessary, but she might at least look for an alternative first. You took what you get.
He mouthed, Distract. She tilted her head. He backed up a pace. She looked at a necklace in a display case. “It looks awfully heavy.”
“Glass usually is,” he mused.
The shopkeep bristled. “The shine you mistake for glass is simply a high polish—”
The shopkeep stepped beside her with a set of keys. Aestith scanned the room and stepped back, carefully, toward the counter. To get behind it, he would have to go past the swing gate, so he leaned against it, waited, then stretched an arm back. A finger brushed a drawer. He twisted the skeleton key, carefully in time to Jaele’s objections. The case opened and he pulled back the drawer.
It would be extremely unlikely that the shopkeep kept anything nasty in the drawer, but drow didn’t live long by being naive. He swiped a penknife from the counter and stuck it in the drawer, carefully prodding the interior, then put his hand down. It alighted on something smooth and leather. He found the edge--pages of thin vellum. Carefully, he slid the book partway out. Jaele was looking over the diamonds critically. The shopkeep had his back to him, but there were mirrors of polished brass all over the shop and light enough that they actually mattered.
He glanced back at his hand. The book was plain--it would be too easy to keep a family crest on it. He flipped it open with a thumb. Written in a neat, careful hand--the chart of accounts. Not even a recent page, but he didn’t need recent.
House Velweb counted for half the transactions. All of which were quite high.
Velweb. He closed the book and slid it back in the drawer. He cleared his throat and Jaele stilled, but only briefly. She looked at herself in a small silver mirror, frowning, then quickly changed her mind and set the mirror down. The shopkeep insisted on removing the necklace, delicately, from her throat. Jaele tapped her heel, like Amalette.
Someone in their family was social climbing.
Who?
Virabel embezzling from the family business was too obvious, and too stupid considering that she was the head of the household. More likely, someone was trying to undermine her, or frame her. Who was cunning enough for that, but not cunning enough to keep from leaving tracks?
It wasn’t necessarily a family member either. It could be another family who thought they were too powerful, or it could be a lower family who thought they had something to gain by sabotaging them. Well, Tith'Rix had any number of enemies or people they had crossed. The lesser cartel families might want a bigger piece of the pie--that would be the Innis connection, though he didn’t think that this particular strand necessarily led back to the current tapestry they were unraveling. It was unlikely noble involvement; the nobles had been snubbing the Tith'Rix for years, refusing to allow them in despite any accumulated wealth or that they were the main body of power in drugs and smuggling operations. It was an exclusive party. And they had yet to have a priestess in the family.
Tith’Rix kept Lolth’s favor only by seeking out talented commoners and sponsoring their clerical education, thereby honoring the command to produce at least one cleric per family. It was an ill omen.
What do I know about Velweb? Hours of memorizing family crests, estates, and names flashed by his memory. He settled on the blue on red of Velweb. Names. Faces. Family traits. Family business--slave trade. Of course they patronized a jewelry shop. Where the owner kept watching Jaele.
Maybe he was wrong and it was something else.
No matter what was going on, the important matter was--how can this work to advantage? Find out who benefits, and I have a suspect.
On the walk back, he told Jaele what he had read, in carefully worded fragments she pieced together.
“The matron of house Velweb is a clor priestess,” Jaele mused. Jaele made it her business to know any priestess in a notable order of the clergy. The order of clor were a fairly common priestess of the Ceremonial sect; they performed the daily rituals and had no special traditions. Such a priestess would be eager for advancement. She added, “And no matron.”
Aestith’s lips pressed together in thought. A matron with no lineage, a priestess but a common sort, who paid off spies selling jewelry to watch the merchant houses, with a possible tie to Innis. She would be a noble, but she needed leverage, and was searching for it. What was the tie to the jewelry store? Money laundering?
Jaele turned and led him down the path to the mushroom grove. The first section was functional but decorative, the mushrooms being equal parts for show as carefully cultivated patches that were actually for eating. Slaves tended the patches. Sometimes, Aestith would even come out himself to pick choice mushrooms or to sit under one of the giant glowing stalks and read. The mushrooms were not ready to spore yet, but when they did, the spores held a luminescent glow that he still thought was pretty.
The next section boasted a decorated stone partition wall, more to keep the poisonous variety away from the edible sort. Haeltania often spent time here, in a mask. The tending slaves wore cloth masks over their noses and mouths, moving slowly and with care lest they trigger a vaporous cloud. The siblings stayed to the path.
The drow male, having spied the pair steadily making their way there, had the gate to the inner section unlocked by the time they arrived. He opened it for them wordlessly.
The inner circle of the garden was the largest, counterintuitively. The area was well-guarded and patrolled at regular intervals. The tending slaves wore no protective garb, but were nonetheless closely watched, for this was the source of the family wealth--not in clerics or magic, nor gems or metals, but a simple mushroom.
This was what was dried or distilled and smuggled to the surface and other places in the Underdark, along with vials of poisons, drinks, and whatever Desarandia could bear to part with from the forge. Fresh, the somnium webcap produced a most effective toxin but when dried or smoked with the right ingredients or distilled like essential oil, then consumed, gave an individual a marvelous hallucinatory experience that was both brief and highly addictive yet rarely deadly--allegedly. Coupled with a neutralizing agent that cured addiction, it was even sold to the brothel, House of Page.
Aestith had never sampled one; Virabel said that only fools consumed their own stock. Even if it weren’t for Virabel, he feared his actions under such an influence. If he were going to eat one, it would be so he wouldn’t feel pain while he died.
The surface world was too bright and too far from the radiation for the mushrooms to thrive, so they did not fear a surface supplier emerging, as it were. Tragically, all the other Enainsi suppliers had met with most unfortunate accidents some time ago and the subsequent mushroom was cultivated to perfection since.
Aestith had had to memorize all of the cultivation, curing, and distilling process, because he so often came down to perform the task himself or to supervise it. Jaele again kept to the path and slaves hastily scurried from her presence. Even the ones in the grove skittered away--which was unusual. They knew something.
Jaele picked her way along the straight, unwinding path to the smokehouse. A drow guard opened the door for her. She stopped. “He’s inside?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, head down.
She nodded and Aestith followed her in. The skin crawled on the back of his neck. There was only one reason for this. His lips pulled into a sneer. “Someone was stealing from our stores?”
She snorted a laugh. “If you don’t learn to pay attention, you’ll find your end at a knifepoint, Aestith.”
He made a face. Guards lined the walls, watching the slaves at the ovens, and more closely watching the ones with the small knives cutting mushrooms at the tables. At the far end, another slave carefully monitored the glass distilling instruments. It had to be glass, Haeltania had told him, because glass had no scent and left no taste; it produced a higher quality of the drug. Additionally, the liquid form was more potent, and carried less risk of someone harvesting spores. That one was usually sold in the Underdark.
Someone could be hitting the supply trains hoping for a raw shipment too.
The room boasted a mere two doors. One would lead to the smokehouse, and the other the storage. They went to the storage door and a guard opened it for them.
Slaves boxed and sorted stone jars and thin kid leather packets. They stilled as the siblings passed. A guard lifted a trapdoor and led them down the steps. Aestith’s breath frosted in the cellar air. Dimly glowing runes marked the spell used to keep the room cool. Alchemical reagents lined the walls in jars and vials. Some of the contents moved.
Ancient bloodstains marred the floor. A heavy chain stretched taught from the ceiling at the end of which dangled a naked male drow. The tips of his toes just touched the floor. Cuffed from behind, the manacles were attached to the chain, which could be lowered or raised by a wheel on the wall. It could take nearly a turn to die from the slow strangulation such a posture produced. It must have been Amalette’s doing; she preferred torture by a thousand discomforts and using the body against itself. Though she must have been hasty about it, because usually she treated it like an artistic piece.
“Caught thieving.” Jaele smirked. “Not very good at it though.”
“Could he have already moved one somewhere?”
She shook her head. “Unlikely. It would only take one or two.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why risk getting more, unless you are either very reckless, or stupid enough to botch the first batch?”
“Or greedy and impatient.” He frowned and glanced at the guard. “Well?”
The male straightened. “We searched his quarters. He was packed, we speculate that he had prepared to leave with the product last bell.”
Jaele looked at the hanging male. “Caught like a fly in a web.” She glanced at Aestith. “Satisfied?”
“Who is he?”
Jaele shrugged one shoulder, as if it didn’t matter.
His eyes narrowed and he looked at the guard, who answered, “Dacec Naarisshi.”
Aestith, for the life of him, couldn’t remember the house. “Commoner?” he hazarded.
The guard shook his head and might have spat if not for the presence of a woman. “Little higher than a slave.”
“Did you question his family?”
Jaele shrugged. “They seem to all be dead.” She clarified, “We were unable to find anyone by that name.”
“Did it ever exist?” He pinched the bridge of his nose in thought. That was the problem with drow politics--you kill a family and they stopped existing in history. It made it impossible to keep accurate logs of who actually did exist, or ever had. He looked at the alleged Dacec Naarisshi and frowned. He went to the wall and cranked it, slowly. Link by link, the chain slackened until the male’s feet touched the floor. He heaved deep gulps of air, gasping with relief. His arms still strained above his head, numb with the blood drained from them. He looked wearily at Aestith. Aestith smiled. “Dacec is your real name, I trust?”
The male nodded, his lips pressed shut.
“How long have you worked for us?”
The question was met with silence.
Aestith gestured at the wall. “I think Dacec has a bit too much slack on the chain.”
“No!”
The guard stopped. Aestith raised an eyebrow. Jaele smirked, leaning against a desk. His eyes shifted toward her. Yes, this is why she brought me. As much for Dacec as to test what I’ve learned. Because of that, he also knew that whatever the other told them, it didn’t matter. “Oh? Something you care to divulge?”
His mouth snapped shut again.
Aestith leaned forward and fished his knife from his boot. “How much more painful will it be, I wonder, to hang there after I’ve cut off a toe? Try balancing on a bleeding stub, Dacec.”
The male looked from the knife, to the chain. Aestith watched the male weighing his options, then Dacec lowered his head. The thing about drow, there was little use in trying to hold out against torture. A drow’s childhood numbed them to a bit of pain, but they knew that they’d talk eventually. They knew what their own kind liked to do for fun. “Two years.”
Aestith smiled. “Do you see what we do to those who try to steal it to eat it?”
The male swallowed.
“So what possessed you to try to steal it to grow it?”
Silence.
“Money, I wager.” He sighed. “If you were working for a family, now is the time to tell me. I’m going to cut something off otherwise.”
The male eyed the knife; he knew it wasn’t a bluff, but he said nothing anyway. He knew drow ways--he wasn’t getting away and it would be painful no matter what he might do. Aestith gestured to the guard. The other male held the bound one still. Aestith took his knife. The boot knife was more an instrument for stabbing and cutting than flaying. It was messy and he sometimes cut too deeply or too shallowly. The cut was jagged and the skin didn’t peel as cleanly as it would have otherwise. The man screamed and thrashed. One strip of skin dangled from his toe. Aestith’s eyes flicked up at him.
The male whimpered. Jaele sneered. Aestith tapped the knife against the exposed muscle. “I can cut it off. Tell me who you’re working for, and I’ll cut it off,” he said gently.
The man sobbed. Aestith moved to make another cut.
The other wailed. “No! Just…” He stilled.
Aestith’s shoulders sagged. This was pitiful. He glanced at Jaele, then back at him. “No one was even paying you? Do you know much money Innis or Evafarra would pay for one of these?” He rubbed a temple with his free hand. “Where were you going to go?”
Did Dacec think he could have ran away and started a business somewhere else?
Couldn’t be. He made another cut. A third. He threatened to slit open the man’s cheeks--drow were by nature vain. With the knife to the corner of his lip, Dacec said, “I don’t know their name.”
“You remember anything about them?”
At first, he didn’t, then later he gave a description that could have been anyone, too vague to mean anything. Aestith wasn’t even certain Dacec wasn’t making it up.
Jaele shook her head. “Aestith, killing him is at the cusp of charity. Someone this stupid should be grateful to end it.”
Sighing, he rose and flicked the knife downward. It cut into the man’s exposed stomach. His skin put up some resistance to the sharp blade, but it split to the rib cage. Aestith stepped to the side to avoid the blood and viscera spilling from the wound.
He cleaned the blade absently on a cloth and washed his hands in a basin. They left the man screaming behind them.
What had that really been about? Or did his sisters suspect there was something slightly off about him and wanted to make sure he wasn’t soft?
“How do your lessons progress?” Jaele said as they made their way through the building.
Aestith shrugged. He assumed she must mean blade work, since she’d never ask about his other studies. “I’ve accepted that I’ll never be remarkable with a blade.”
“Try a bow,” she suggested.
“I’m all right with a crossbow.” He made a face. “Though I do think I’ll study wizardry.” They passed into the garden.
“You’re fair at it, are you not?”
He smirked. “Decent. And I shall only improve.”
She nodded. “We could use that.” She paused and lowered her voice, “Just under a turn. Eight bells, Aestith. Be ready.” She lifted her head. “And now, I’ve our guards to cajole.” She parted with him at the gate.
When he made his way through the side door into the house, the sight of Descaronan’s spear in the armory drove him to hide in the kitchen. Descaronan spent long excursions hunting and came back rarely when he was actually at home, but he held no doubt whatsoever that if she knew about him, she’d kill him.
He swallowed, staring down at the bread dough.
So would, probably, all of his other sisters--maybe even Jaele. Why was this happening?
He raised his hands to rub his temples, realized they were covered in dough, and stopped. He set his hand down.
Why was this bad?
Because if he metamorphosed into a woman, even a body shape resembling the feminine, he would be viewed as a threat. Why? He wouldn’t technically be female.
But it might be close enough by society’s standards. He couldn’t deny that it was a malformation, an imperfection to be culled from their race. Blemishes were extracted.
What if he were viewed as blessed by the goddess?
He threw the dough into a greased bowl and set it aside. He grabbed the other mound of dough and slapped it down on the floured surface.
The more he thought about it seriously, how could it be a curse? Males were practically useless. If the goddess thought him worthy enough to change his shape, didn’t that mean he had some form of value to her?
Was he looking at this the wrong way? Like the flood banks of Niar I’dol near the farms, leaving behind rich silt? It looked like a curse, but it was a blessing?
Yet he knew his sisters would kill him, for fear of him social climbing, or else because blemishes in the drow bloodline were removed. He may just be an imperfection that was overlooked when he should have been culled.
He knew little of gods other than Lolth, but he did know that many of them were not as binary as the drow pantheon, shifting between male and female--that was how they were portrayed in the Mystery Cycles.
Surely that would only play out all the worse for him?
He had to know--but how?
He had to commune with the deity. He stared at the door. Not the house shrine. He barely visited it. He—
How arrogant. How could he think he had been blessed? He believed in Lolth. He went through all the motions, because it was expected and normal, but he inwardly thought that was utterly exhausting.
You had to have at least a modicum of belief when the numerous gods could literally talk and interact with their followers, when sacrifices actually did something. His faith was based on seeing real, tangible results. But he wasn’t the target market. He was just a byproduct, useful for reproduction or meat for the grinder--all of which was perfectly logical and sensible.
No, he couldn’t be blessed.
It was an accident of fate, some grave error that his sisters and everyone who might ever find out would correct. He couldn’t go to the goddess, out of shame.
So that left what? Hiding until he couldn’t?
I don’t want to die.
He had never been more certain of anything in his life than that he wanted to keep living it. He needed a solution. Something that didn’t involve cowardice if he could help it.
The door to the courtyard opened. Aestith lifted his head, then attacked the dough with renewed vigor. The slave bustled past. The low lantern clinging to his belt clanged as he walked.
The human man unloaded lumps of coal for the stove from a wheelbarrow, then closed the lid to fetch the rest. He filled it with the second load then washed his hands, muttering something in his native tongue. Aestith pieced together bits of it, then said, “What are you talking about?”
The man turned toward him and said, in his broken Common dialect, “Trees. Make better fuel than coal.” He gestured. “Burns better, flavors the food. Variety of heat and burn time. Would make better bread.”
Aestith snorted. “Imported and expensive.”
“You try it. You never want another fuel.”
Aestith shook his head. He had seen drawings and paintings of trees before, but he had trouble in actually believing in them. He had seen wheat, but mostly they got flour imported from the surface farms when Virabel could justify the expense--usually on some holiday or another. He had never seen a surface plant actually growing--nor did he have any desire to. Even stories about the sky and the air there gave him chills. “And they just… grow. Like lichen.”
“Bigger.”
He smiled, because it sounded insane.