“Now I am here,” he announced between the words of his casting. “And an instant later, I am-here!”
Nothing happened. Jack stood before the three dark elves, dumbfounded. He’d never botched a spell in that manner before, not one he knew so well. He offered an embarrassed grin, and quickly repeated the spell, only to fail again. He remained exactly where he was, an arm’s reach from the frozen form of Myrkyssa Jelan.
The dark elves shared predatory grins. “Perhaps you should give a little pirouette and announce that you are immaterial?” Jaeren asked. “Or you might make a whooshing sound as your proceed to your destination?”
“I was rather expecting him to run across the square and make a show of ‘appearing’ by the table,” Jezzryd remarked. “Standing there stupidly is much less entertaining.”
“We’re still waiting for you to magic yourself to your destination, Jack,” Dresimil said. “I must tell you, I shall be very disappointed if you have exaggerated your arcane talents.”
With a terrible sinking despair, Jack realized that not only had his teleportation failed-so, too, had his spell of invisibility. No wonder the drow had seemed so astonished. He’d been acting like an idiot, capering about under the mistaken belief that he was unseen. “I–I am certain that I will recall the proper forms of my spellcasting soon,” he stammered. “It must be some lingering effect of my encystment in the mythal stone. You will see, I am a very useful fellow-”
The three dark elves laughed aloud. “Pray, no more for now, Lord Wildhame,” Dresimil finally said. “So far you have been an amusing guest, but I must warn you against becoming tiresome. Should you recover your arcane powers-” the three dark elves shared another chuckle at that-“then perhaps we will find another way to put your talents to work.” She motioned to two of the guards standing nearby. “Varys, Sinafae, take our guest here down to Malmor. Tell him to provide Lord Wildhame with clothing and quarters suitable to his station, and introduce him to his duties.”
Jack started to protest, but checked himself. He wasn’t sure what Lady Dresimil would do if she decided that he was tiresome, but he suspected that he wouldn’t like it in the least. It was clear that his customary charm and talents were not as useful as he would have hoped in this dismal new age, however he had stumbled into it. Time to make the best of a poor hand. He drew himself up with all the dignity he could muster and bowed graciously. “I am at your disposal, my lady,” he said.
“Of course you are, my dear Lord Jack,” the drow noblewoman replied. She watched with a bemused smile as the dark elf guards came up on either side and marched him away from the plaza.
A thousand questions hovered at the tip of Jack’s tongue as he slogged along between the guards, dejected. For the moment he shut them out of his mind and gazed at the curious scene around him. The exposed lake bed was still quite muddy in many places, and the dark elves’ laborers had laid down large planks of a curious gray wood over the worst patches of muck. Slimy walls outlined the shapes of ancient buildings surrounding the mythal stone’s plaza. Jack couldn’t imagine why anybody had built a city on the bottom of a lake, but then he realized that the lake’s level must have varied significantly over time. When he’d been here a hundred years ago (and that was a thought that made his knees go weak), the lake had clearly been much fuller. He didn’t remember seeing old buildings on the lake bed then, but perhaps they’d been buried in muck or simply hidden by the murky water. The ancient drow had built their city here when the shore was dry; the lake had flooded at some point afterward and remained that way through Jack’s first visit to the site; now the lake had fallen, revealing the old city again. Given the scale of the excavations and the miserable slaves toiling to clear away the muck, Jack decided the drow had drained the lake deliberately. But why would they care about old ruins?
“This all seems like a great deal of trouble,” he said to the guards escorting him, waving an arm to indicate the ruins. “If I may ask, what is the point of the work?”
The guards turned on him, eyes narrowed. One stepped forward and drew a long, supple baton from his belt in a single motion, flicking it across Jack’s upper arm with whiplike speed before Jack could even register that he was under attack. The sharp crack of the baton echoed in the damp air, and Jack buckled in pain. “Slaves do not speak unless spoken to,” the guard snarled. “Call any drow you must address master if you wish to keep your tongue in your head. Do you understand?”
“Damn it!” Jack wailed. “Was that necessary?”
The baton flicked again, and this time slashed him across his left knee. Jack crumpled to the ground. The baton was more than simple wood; it had a rasping, almost sticky feel to it, and a fierce burning sting began to rise up in the welt it left behind. “I said, do you understand?” the drow guard shouted.
“Yes,” Jack replied. Seeing the drow’s hand draw back for a third blow, Jack cringed. His arm and leg were afire where the stinging rod had touched him. “Yes, master! Yes, master. I understand!”
“Speak again before we get to the fields and we’ll beat you until you can’t walk,” the second guard said. “And if you can’t keep up with us, you’ll wish we’d killed you instead. Now get up, slave.”
Jack pushed himself to his feet, not daring to say another word. Dresimil and her brothers had struck him as reasonably well-mannered people, not remotely as bloodthirsty and barbaric as drow were reported to be. Granted, they’d taken a certain cruel pleasure in his unusual predicament, but he knew plenty of surface nobles who might have done the same. But now that Dresimil was done with him, he was just a slave … and evidently the drow weren’t in the habit of wasting courtesies on their chattel.
The guards escorting him set off again, and Jack hobbled after them, determined not to provide either with an excuse to strike him again. They passed out of the ruins into a belt of gigantic mushrooms the size of trees, into a forest of pale gray fungi on the floor of the vast cavern. A crew was at work sawing a fallen stalk into the slick gray planks he’d seen in the ruins-naturally, the drow wouldn’t have easy access to the trees of the surface world-but Jack carefully kept his questions to himself. The path led through the fungal grove to the gates of a great dark castle, which loomed over the cavern floor. Weird globes and twisting streamers of eldritch light danced along the ramparts and spires of the structure, which seemed to have been carved from a ring of enormous stalagmites. Here, before the gates of the castle, the guards turned onto a path leading to a stone-fenced paddock lying beneath the castle ramparts. Jack became aware of a heavy animal stink in the air, a charming combination of dank fur, dung, and crushed fungus.
They halted before a crude bunkhouse or shelter of stone, mud, and moss. “Malmor!” the guard who’d struck Jack called. “We’ve got a new dung-shoveler for you, Malmor.”
There was a thick, snuffling grunt, and then a huge, shaggy figure appeared in the shelter’s doorway. Its yellowed skin was covered in lank, reddish hair, and a vast belly sagged over its ill-fitting leather breaches. The creature-a bugbear, Jack thought, although he’d never seen one so fat-bobbed his head and grinned crookedly at the drow guards. “Good, good, masters. I have much work, much work. But I do not like the looks of this one, no, no. Too small, too small, too thin, I think. He seems a shirker to me, a shirker he seems.”
“That is hardly our concern now,” the second drow guard said.