The “junk cart” looked like anything else that dwarves made. It had been built to be sturdy and to last, with little regard to aesthetics. It had been repaired and pieces had been replaced from other broken carts until none of the original likely remained. Every joint and greased axle looked to be made of a different material. It offended Aestith’s eyes.
It was so horrifically ugly and visually assaulting that he could not help staring at the monstrosity. It was like some great, hideous beast lumbering toward him with its jaw freakishly agape, but it was too impossible to really exist. In the back of the cart, piled in trunks and boxes or drawers situated to be opened from the side of the cart, jingled an assortment of items. Old and used, discarded and abandoned or plucked from decayed bodies all around the caves.
Children mobbed the cart clamorously, showing things they wanted to trade. A pouch of marbles that, for the child, had lost its luster, or a set of dice that didn’t quite bring the same luck, or perhaps a doll missing a button eye. They went through a wooden chest hunting for treasures to exchange. The adults looked through scraps of leather and cloth, old clothes and boots, and other such things.
Aestith waited until most of the crowd had dissipated, and looked himself, because the thing was so damned ugly he couldn’t believe it actually existed. He had no intention of actually looking through the scavenged items, but something in one of the open boxes glinted. The shades of heat and warmth he associated with “vision” had a hole in it, as if something was drawing his attention. The cool shades of the box of knives and daggers nearly eclipsed something slightly warmer than the rest, green instead of the cool blue. He knelt, idly curious and with nothing better to do.
He sorted through the box. Here and there, an old blade had magnetized and stuck oddly to another. He pulled them apart gingerly, wary of rust, quietly irritated that the dwarf would do this. Weapons should be gently taken care of, not thrown in a box, and certainly not unsheathed and covered in rust!
Then Aestith thought, What an interesting lesson for the unwary to learn.
He removed the last knife from the thing he sought and gingerly lifted the warm one from the box. He let the others shift back to where they had been.
He almost dropped the knife when he saw what it was, then caught it before he fumbled it. The blades were rusted and more than one was broken. It was tarnished and dirty. The duergar had probably found some part of it unearthed and had to dig it out at some point. It was a cleric’s ceremonial knife, drow-make.
He ran a thumb over the spider. It was old, probably an older model than was used now, and it looked like it had been custom-made. The spider formed the crossguard and the hilt was a naked drow woman. He thought two rubies had once been her eyes. He rubbed the head of the spider, finding empty sockets where it, too, had once had eyes. Her long hair was made of yellowed bone. The eight blades formed a conical shape, each one a leg of the spider.
Someone had poured a fair amount of money into it. He imagined some Matron Mother having it forged, unique to her family. Then she or someone down her line had lost favor with the Spider Queen, and now here the weapon was.
Discarded and lost. The idea of something being lost for ages and then found again by someone disconnected from it with no knowledge of its history fascinated him in a way that Bellan said was “romantic” in the classic sense of the word, owing nothing to the amorous meaning it now held. He had used to have a collection of such artifacts, in Enainsi. Jaele called it his “junk collection”. Virabel had told him, Aes, you like that shit because it reminds you of yourself. She had meant it to be insulting, but he had been just young enough that it had gone over his head. These days, it wasn’t even insulting; it was just true.
His thumb ran up her figure, over her face. He rose, idly looking into the other boxes, then he went to the dwarf who owned the ridiculous cart. He shrugged and said, “I suppose this will do.”
The dwarf glanced at it. “Remind you of home, eh?”
Aestith looked at him blankly. “Remind me of what, pray tell? I scarcely remember it.” It was a lie, but an easy one to come to his lips, for who really remembers their childhood? He had spent such a brief period of his life there, after all, when measured against what he expected to live. He imagined that he would never see it again.
The dwarf eyed him critically, then glanced again at the knife. He made a face and hummed and hawed at it. “It’s an Underdark blade, so…” He scratched his beard and named a figure that was simply too high.
And Aestith shrugged and looked at it again. He made a face. “Blade? I wouldn’t call it a blade so much as a bit of metal held together with rust.”
The dwarf appraised the knife as if he had not really looked at it the first time. He lowered the price marginally and explained, “The hilt is still in excellent condition.”
Aestith snorted. “Hardly, look at the eyes.”
They went back and forth several times and eventually, Aestith set the knife down and turned. The dwarf named a much more reasonable price then and Aestith paid it with a deep sigh, taking care to act as if this were some great favor he were doing the scavenger, rather than to let his pleasure show.
Goblin read fortune.
Maybe he should have let the slave read his fortune in his spit. Maybe it could have told him something useful. Or, more likely, it would just tell him something cryptic that could mean anything depending on how he interpreted it and it would just turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When you believed something was true, you often strove to fulfill it and make it true despite the challenges.
It didn’t matter, to Aestith, if he were actually Lolth’s Chosen or not; he believed that he was and his behaviors reflected that. It drove him to learn and to want to succeed. He always had to improve. Stagnation was worse than failure.
#
Aestith had to wait for Darley to finish hammering a piece of hot iron. She dunked it in water to quench it, then removed it before she walked to him.
She grinned. “I know what you’re after. Be right back.” She limped as she walked. One leg was shorter than the other. If she were drow, they would have killed her at birth. And lost a very good smith, he mused, thinking of his own small deformities. If that was a suitable term. But she wasn’t a drow, and dwarves didn’t believe that their people benefited from the competition so prevalent in drow society. Far be it from him to suggest that maybe a better smith could have emerged with a physically perfect body. Desarandian was the best smith he knew, and she was perfect, wasn’t she? A pang of homesickness twisted in his gut.
These thoughts faded as the duergar returned. By the standards of her kin, she was beaming. She carried a piece of oiled leather, folded over to hide the item. She stood before him and looked from side to side, then flipped the leather back.
His breath caught in his lungs and he nearly choked on it.
In the low light of the lanterns and the smith’s fires, the black bone handle gleamed. The ivory hair cascaded down the figure’s back in thin, intricate tendrils. Her nipples were taught. She writhed as if in either pain or ecstasy, or maybe both. The face was crafted with such exquisite detail he wondered if it were not a real drow’s likeness, maybe the original bearer of the weapon. Fastened in the carving’s eyes were two small rubies. The spider, too, had eight eyes of varying size. The legs extended into blades, each with the bluish, wavey quality of well-folded steel. He felt, almost, as if he should avert his eyes.
“Making a sheath for that was a real piece of work, tell you what,” she said.
He jerked his head toward her face as if he had forgotten she was there. “Hmm?”
She threw the leather back over the knife. It seemed to break whatever spell had fallen over him. She picked up another bundle and showed him the work. His finger ran lightly over the tooling, crisscrossed in a web of fine leather. It ran counter to all he knew about duergar. The trouble with them, and actually why they so rarely felt fear, was that they had no imagination to inspire creativity. Then again, she had seen drow craftsmanship; she didn’t have to be creative when the favorite motifs of his kind were web patterns. That all came down to mathematics.
“This is… beautiful, but it’s far more than I—”
She shrugged. “If’n you ask a dwarf to make a repair on a weapon, Aestith, ye shouldn’t expect that we’ll go halfway.” She glanced at the small swell under the leather. “Even for something as wicked as that.”
His eyebrows arched. “Wicked?”
She stared at him. “Don’t tell me you’re ignorant, Aestith.”
His brow wrinkled. Ignorant of what? That Lolth called for rivalry and chaos, sacrifice, and struggle? Wasn’t that life itself? Wasn’t every aspect of life a struggle? Even animals struggled. Even animals made their own sacrifices. Rivalry kept one another in balance, it promoted competition, which was better for everyone. Animals benefited from such things too. As did businesses, tournaments, contests—why not people?
Why, the duergar master tanner refused to train an apprentice because he didn’t want the possible rivalry! Aestith could see an organized chaos in nearly everything—children at play, politics, animals. Rock and earth were predictable and followed a pattern, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t chaotic for the insects living in it when the earth surged and the rock melted to magma.
Everyone else thought Lolth some being of ultimate evil, even while they were guilty of similar things they criticized her for. Hypocrisy infuriated him most of all. He stifled his temper, the sudden surge in him that demanded violence. It wasn’t worth the trouble. So the red flashed in his eyes but a moment and was gone when he blinked. He smiled. “I don’t know what you speak of.” He overpaid her, feeling he had little choice, and looked again at the hilt. “The rubies are—”
“Daft drow,” she scoffed. “Ain’t rubies.”
He looked up. “But—”
“Ya see a red gemstone and they’re all rubies to you.” She snorted. “Can’t tell sandstone from soapstone, I bet.” She sighed. “It’s bixbite.”
He frowned. “Oh.”
Darley threw up her hands. “Ya don’t even know what that is, damn it—don’t act disappointed.” She scowled. “And they claim dark elves know a gem as well as most dwarves. Bah!”
He scowled in turn. “I was a child when I left, and anyway, I don’t mean—”
“They’re emeralds.”
He paused. “Oh.” He looked again at the emeralds. “I thought those were green.”
“Ha!” she stomped away, muttering something about dark elves being ignorant of the earth they lived in. He had to concede; he was ignorant of many things. He hid the dagger under his jacket, the weight already as familiar to him as if he had always had it.
Not everyone whispered about him lately, but there were certain silences when he passed that had not been there before, or an elbow toward a friend.
What was more amusing, they weren’t talking in hushed rumors about how he had murdered pregnant women and impaled babies on spikes; they whispered instead about how he must have wielded such terrible power that his own family had chased him out but been too afraid to kill him. The more he denied all of it, the more they seemed to believe it. Seeing him help with menial chores did absolutely nothing to alleviate these rumors. They only claimed that he “wanted them to believe he was perfectly ordinary”.
Words have power; it is why so much of magic requires them. Virabel had said that, but he could not recall the context.
Virabel had sat as she wound a strip of salve-soaked cloth around one of his hands; he had cut himself on a blade. He had been small and he barely remembered why, but she had said, Aestith, if you don’t know when not to use a weapon, don’t pick it up in the first place.
Her lessons were always punctuated by pain for one reason or another, but he remembered them vividly.
He honestly didn’t think anyone from Enainsi would recognize him anymore. Sometimes, he did not recognize his own reflection. Puberty had come and went and he should have gone through the ceremonies with the others, off to the Academy. He should have done many things by now. Including be killed, he imagined.
He could not be more lonely.
The small house—much smaller than he had ever been accustomed to—felt larger than his family home in Enainsi. There were only so many chores he could do, only so much guard duty he could continuously volunteer for until they sent him home. He sat in front of the cold hearth, falling slowly into Reverie that was just a nameless black void. He didn’t think he could ever live alone. How could anyone stand it? It was so quiet, so empty. He left Reverie feeling even more lonely.
The roads back to Enainsi were long. You could get lost there, in the tunnels. You could be lost for years if you were extremely unfortunate—and lucky enough not to die of starvation or dehydration or something else. Perhaps just fortunate enough to have some middle-aged dwarfs take pity on a drow youth?
He had asked Bellan, only once, what possessed her to take him, rather than leave him to die. He understood that some drow occasionally traded with them, but he also understood that other drow elves had a deserved reputation for raiding, or they’d fight one another. Or simple age-old grudges or any number of other reasons. Perhaps thinking he might one day prove of value? She had only shrugged and said, You were a child.
There was a theory that nurture could beat out nature. Perhaps that is what she assumed she could do, but he was too old for that, certainly. And anyway, he didn’t want to act like a dwarf. What did that even entail anyway? He had been with them for years, and he certainly didn’t know. Quaffing ale and belching?
Duergar were probably the most like drow; they were spurned by their surface cousins, contended with the Illithids, and eked out a living in the Underdark. They were also, it may be worthy to note, bent toward what other races might think of as evil. Aestith didn’t see it, but his interpretation of such a concept made the notion moot. They may extract tolls for using their roads, and enforce a heavy penalty when those tolls weren’t paid, and they might cheat travelers, but Aestith saw nothing unusual about any of it. That was probably the real reason Bellan and Qelkan had collected him; he knew Elvish and drow signing, and if some drow caravan wanted to have a private discussion, he could spy. It cropped up only occasionally, and he caught nothing very important. What duergar didn’t seem to realize is that drow would just as casually sign jokes or sarcastic comments to one another as say them out loud, for no other reason than that spoken words echoed. For many drow, they learned to sign before they had mastered speech, so it was just as easy to use signs as words.
He could wander into the bowels of the Underdark. He could pop out in some community no one knew him, say he was someone else. Those who left their cities were ignored, not hunted, so long as they didn’t betray Lolth. He didn’t have to keep on this path with the dwarves, did he? But he knew if he did that, it would only be a matter of time before he convinced himself that it was safe to see his sisters, and he didn’t think he had learned enough. He would end up enslaved and then killed if he did that.
He stopped then, plinking on the strings of some minor decision that could have major consequences. He went back to what would never be home but what he stubbornly insisted had to be home.
#
Living with the dwarves was a fascinating anthropological study to Aestith. They would never really accept Aestith, just as he never really accepted them.
However, over the past six years, their outright disgust grew to only a displeasure and then to a good-natured disdain. Bellan was right; Aestith’s presence gave her neighbors a good scandal to discuss and they only seemed to approve of it. If something went missing, it was that drow. And if it turned up later, well he had only given it back because they had been loudly complaining. If someone fell and sprained their ankle, it was that drow. Nevermind that Aestith was rarely even nearby. Some dwarves would comment to this nature, saying that they had never seen Aestith do anything more vile than the sin of reading in dim lighting, but this was only cause for more gossip.
Bellan thrived on it, alternately fanning and dousing the flames wherever was convenient. Qelkan had little use for it, beyond the ability to tell tales and getting free drinks at the local pub. For Aestith’s part, he found his role as shifting from a harbored criminal to a roadside oddity. He wasn’t certain if this was a positive change or not. He almost preferred it when they were afraid of him.
A gaggle of dwarf children stood in a cluster, whispering about Aestith. He kept his eyes on the book and did his best to ignore them. Aestith actually liked children, so long as he wasn’t responsible for them; they saw the world differently than adults, frequently spoke their minds, and didn’t know enough to fear. Moreover, they were easy to manipulate.
One of the children strode up to him. She shook in her boots, but she raised her sliver of a chin and said, “Is it true?”
“Anything could be true, for a given value of ‘true’, I suspect,” Aestith said, turning the page.
Deep furrows creased her smooth brow as she stewed over his words, then shook her head as if to chase them back—if a drow elf said something confusing, it might be a curse, after all. She looked back at her compatriots, who waved her encouragement. She took a breath. “That dark elf children are plunged into the depths of the earth, where the forges burn hot an’ yer come out blackened with yer hair all turned t’ ash!”
He suppressed an amused grin and lifted his head. One eyebrow cocked. “Well, that is fictional nonsense worthy of a novel.” He winked. “One might note, however, that it is indeed infants we lower into it. In a special basket. The languid ones return to us as naught but little piles of ash.”
Her eyes widened to discs and her jaw dropped. “Do yer remember goin’ into it?”
He shook his head. “No, of course I don’t. Might you possess any memory of your infant months? But ‘tis clearly a fact. Else, how might my skin get this shade of gray?”
Her nose wrinkled. “But if’n I burn meself, an’ I have, that don’t happen.”
He allowed himself a small smile. “The fire was begun with a magic spark,” he explained.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s what everyone says when they don’t wanna explain it,” she huffed. She looked him up and down, then, quite boldly, took his dark gray hand with her ash-gray ones and inspected it. He allowed her. She looked at each carefully manicured fingernail, the palms of his hands and the small lines in them. “You’re a rotten liar.”
He tilted his head. “Liar?”
She dropped his hand and pointed at him accusingly. “Yer was born that way, mistress. Yer shouldn’t lie t’ children.”
He lifted the book to hide the grin splitting over his lips. Mirth was considered bad manners among their kind. He said, “Well, how might you discern that what I said ‘twas a lie? What if it were true?”
She stuck out her pink tongue. “If’n they did that t’ infants, the infants would cry. So yer tongue would be black.”
He shrugged. “Then perhaps I didn’t cry. Some drow elves do have black tongues. And teeth.”
She stared dubiously at him. “How do their teeth turn black if’n they haven’t grown in yet?”
His eyebrows arched in surprise. “You’re a clever child, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Me mam says.”
He lowered the book back to his lap. “Well, you found me out.”
She considered this, then nodded. “Stands to reason.” She started to turn, then looked back at him. “You’re not as scary as people say.”
He tilted his head. “Do you want me to be?”
She glanced at her friends, then turned back to him and whispered, “Could yer?”
The corner of his lips pulled into a grin that he turned in a grimace. He winked, then yelled, “So get back, or it’s you I shall lower into the forges of the earth and we shall see if you burn to ash!”
She squealed in delighted terror and fled back to her frightened friends. They ran, catching her screams like a pox and sped away from him. Fear without threat of pain or death was fun.
Aestith smiled to himself. Children, he thought, were not as easily dissuaded as adults. Neither were they so prone to believing lies. Too, he appreciated their bluntness. Simultaneously, he thought that interacting with them made interesting case studies. Non-drow acted so fascinatingly odd.
His palm itched toward the small case he kept the set of bones in, but that didn’t feel right. He touched the dagger under his jacket and gingerly removed the weapon from the sheath.
In the dim glow of the nearby lantern, it gleamed, catching the light. He tilted it until the cool surface went dark, then moved it back. He blinked, letting his infrared fade, the vision he used for reading, because he wanted to see the color of the bixbite. As he moved the blade, the image shifted, a reflection that at first made him look behind him at the rock, then back at the blade. It showed the easternmost cavern, away from the village. He rotated the blade, then back, and the image was gone, but he knew he had seen it.
He needed no provocation. Lolth could tell him to hang himself because it would please her and he would only pause to find the rope. He packed a light pack and explained to Bellan he would be leaving for a short while. He took the dagger with him.
Aestith walked on the narrow path, only branching if one were more east than the other or there was some indication, such as a spider, that he should go one way rather than the other. He stopped infrequently, though came across a kobold once. Alone, it shrieked in terror of him and scampered off. They were usually in groups, so he hurried away from it. He worried that they were tracking him. They were cowardly ordinarily, but they would gang up on someone alone.
He must have walked for another hour or more after that. He had to climb down a space once or twice, nearly got stuck. For the first time, he wondered what he could possibly be after. Why would Lolth send him down here? It wasn’t his place to question, but it still seemed bizarre.
He couldn’t remember seeing a spider or anything of the sort when he saw the image—how did he know he wasn’t going insane? He had heard that people could hear voices, ones that weren’t there, or see things. Not demons or celestials or gods—just their own brain. If Aestith’s own body had turned against him, why not that too? His brain was only a bit of meat in the end anyway, so it wasn’t immune to such things. Not to mention that the Spellplague was ongoing even if it seemed to have been fading drastically in his lifetime from what his sisters had claimed. Allegedly, it could cause things like hallucinations or magic going haywire.
It heartened him to think that his own dread and self-doubt may amuse the Spider Queen, which thickened his resolve like lichen flour in a stew.
A groan echoed off of the cavern walls and he stilled. He slunk to one side and edged toward the sound. He peeked around the corner. The cavern formed a deep ravine with the high ceiling covered in long stalactites and pockmarked with holes. A pillar of rock was worn and hewn in such a way that he assumed, at one point, that it had been a statue. Even when the statue was new, it was half-finished and incomplete. Like someone had begun carving it and then their people had moved on or been killed. At the base of the pillar was a slab of crumbling rough-hewn siltstone, likely moved from somewhere else, then abandoned. He wondered why, the way he had wondered about the history of broken, lost things he kept a collection of when he had been younger.
Aestith had a fleeting, heathenous thought that maybe drow should keep some form of written history. They didn’t need family histories, but events would be useful. He frowned at the thought. And then what? You’d have an entire class of historians who would sit around reading history all day and documenting events, then you’d have people start questioning past deeds, which bred philosophy, then you’d have people questioning all of society and society as he knew it would simply collapse or transform. No, no wonder the Spider Queen had, in her wisdom, decided against such things. His curiosity would do no one any good.
It seemed as good a place to rest as any to rest. He thought that, perhaps, the goal had been to bring him here to pray, maybe to make some attempt to finish the work? He rested there, and prayed, then he cast the bones over the slab.
He had to keep going east. There was little to tell him in the lay of the bones beyond the inclination to keep going eastward.
He did not know what he was searching for, but it took nearly two bells of careful climbing and squeezing through tunnels to get to it. A shrine he knew well, a shrine only he visited. His shoulders slouched a bit. He had been brought here to pray? Odd, he knew other, even easier, routes.
Something warm drew his attention.
A body lay sprawled on the cavern floor. Aestith at first thought it must be dead, but it was actually in a half-sitting position, leaning against a rock. A drow, young enough for his shoulder-length hair to still be white. His leg was twisted at an angle. His pale eyes were shot with pain and delirium. He could not have been here long, or else the kobolds would have gotten to him, but then, the shortsword under the man’s hand just as likely played a role in that.
It was Nier.
Nier who had watched those boys pull Aestith back. Nier who had been so angry at what Aestith’s lying by omission that he had tried, in a very roundabout way, to get Aestith killed. He had no way to prove it was Nier, but he had suspected. And now it didn’t matter. It wasn’t revenge or anything as non-drow as justice; Aestith would never have sought vengeance even if he knew for certain. Lolth disapproved of seeking vengeance.
Aestith could not have guessed what Nier was doing here. Frankly, Aestith could not be bothered to care. His eyes flicked away from his ex-almost-lover and alighted on the altar below the statue.
Wordlessly, he walked to Nier. In his delirium, the other at first struck out, but Aestith danced back from him. Nier dropped the shortsword. “Aestith?” he whispered through a parched throat. A grin made his cracked lips bleed. “Is it really you? We thought you were dead.”
Aestith said nothing. He bent and slid his arms under Nier’s armpits and clasped his hands in front of him. He was relatively gentle when he dragged him, and Nier did nothing to prevent him.
Nier babbled, “They said you died with your sister. That it’s your own fault, because you shouldn’t have gone. I shouldn’t have gone.” He whispered the last. “But they said—a raid on the deep gnomes. I was too young to go regular… but do I want to go? Yes, of course. I never saw it. They’ll never find me.”
Aestith stopped just before the altar and took several deep breaths. He shifted, one arm under Nier’s back, the other under his legs. He lifted him, favoring the broken leg. He laid him down on the crumbling slab. He clasped his hands in quick prayer.
Nier continued, “There’s water down here. But I couldn’t reach it. It’s got to be.” Aestith nodded. Nier’s head rolled. His eyes closed. “Never thought I’d see you again.”
Aestith closed his eyes briefly, then the knife flicked into his hand as if summoned. He bent over Nier’s head and carved, delicately, into his dry skin. Nier thrashed at first, even tried to push him away, but Aestith, frustrated, grabbed Nier by the hair and slammed the back of his head down into the stone. Nier jerked, but went still. He was still breathing.
The young drow’s hand was steadier than it had a right to be. He had drawn this design on old skins and dirt since the vision of it, and he knew every stroke of the symbol. He cradled Nier’s face in one hand as he carved, close enough to kiss. The mark bled. He used the knife to cut open Nier’s leathers to his navel. He peeled the fabric back from the other’s chest. Over his beating heart, Aestith made the second symbol. Each stroke of the knife was a different part of a prayer.
He didn’t know the words to a proper Enainsine prayer for a sacrifice. He was no priestess, no cleric. Just a devotee.
He said, “Lolth test me that I shall succeed. Lolth test me that I am worthy. Lolth test me to refine me to your desires. Lolth test me to temper me like steel to suit your will. May I always serve you.” He spoke the words in Elvish, for even he knew that any other language he knew was an imperfect mixture of others and could not be offered to a goddess.
Nier’s eyes opened when Aestith pressed the knife tip to the center of his forehead, at the heart of the symbol. Pale gray eyes stared into blue. Nier’s eyes widened.
The sacrifice’s lips parted. A vocule sound escaped his mouth.
The knife plunged down. It split the skull like basalt rock. He continued, methodically painting the remaining portion of the ritual. His heart pounded. He must have made mistakes. There was probably some specific order to each line and segment, some word he should have whispered. He leaned back, finished and uncertain. He clasped his hands and prayed, because he felt he must do something but didn’t know what. He hoped that it was enough.
They weren’t words, as such. It was a feeling so strong that it was a word.
I—a nameless noun, an impression of self. Imposing and strong, dark and even venomous. It gave the impression of too many legs and too many eyes.
Am—a state this self was, a connecting verb.
Pleased—a feeling that started in the empty pit of his chest and filled him as if he had been starving all his life and only now felt satiated. It welled through him, warm and fulfilled.
He shuddered, a religious ecstasy that was adjacent to orgasm. Suddenly dizzy, he slid downwards. The presence lifted, but left him with its shadow, a satisfaction of a job well done.