Yrmegard grunts and thinks uncharitable thoughts as she lets more rope out via the pulley she has rigged just above the broken skylight leading into the cursed labyrinth under the hill the folk have always called the Kal’s Mound (or Kalgrave, in a few cases, though Yrmegard has never met anyone who knew this Kal or had any notion what he was about). Forty feet below, one of the lunatics is standing in the circle of light from the aperture and waving her on, as though a basket sent straight down a rope might go anywhere but directly into the fool’s arms.
Soft summer flatbread, liver-and-oat sausages, baked yams stuffed with crackling black pepper pods, cinnamon pie, and straw-colored sweet wine: this is Yrmegard’s contribution to the endeavor, and this is as close as she gets for the midday delivery. Mullion and Tylo and her aunt’s cousin’s friend Arna might poke about in the dark as if they were lunatics themselves, but when Yrmegard brings the catered luncheon, it goes down by rope and she remains in daylight. The thought that one of these days she might hear the last fading screams of those below is both frightful and just the slightest bit secretly attractive-a scold loves nothing more than to have their habits validated (and anyway, Yrmegard’s aunt’s cousin has a lot of friends).
“Hey! Hey up there!” The waiting lunatic has received the basket and started pawing through it.
Yrmegard peers down. She thinks the figure below might be the sorceress, though she doesn’t recall the woman wearing red robes. With a start, she realizes the clothes are drenched in fresh blood. The adventurer seems completely unbothered. “What is it?” Yrmegard shouts.
“There’s supposed to be wine with this!”
“There is!” Yrmegard massages her temples. Last thing she needs is lunatics clawing back coins from their accounts, claiming nondelivery when she knows full well she set a cool clay jar of the stuff in the basket not a handful of minutes ago. Yrmegard might fantasize about some memorable horror erupting below, but the hard truth is she needs the money, same as everyone. “Had it fallen from the basket, surely you’d have caught it right in the face, so it must be there! Look again!”
VI
Success is sweet! The shadows are kind! Success sets the heart to beat-beat-beat!
The treasure is heavy. Oh, the treasure is heavy. But that’s the price of great success!
Or so Glathfrap tells himself. He doesn’t have much experience with great success. None of the Jewel-Eyed Folk do, trapped as they are between the big creatures that come down from the daylight to smash and slay and loot, and the even-worse things that lurk below.
The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small, they are few, and they hide to stay alive.
But they are quick.
Today, Glathfrap reached from the shadows as the big creatures lowered the food basket from the too-bright world above. Today, Glathfrap was quick!
Now he rolls his prize along a scuttleway of the Jewel-Eyed Folk: a jar of wine almost as big as himself. He can hear it sloshing, would love to taste it, to share it, but there is an even more pressing need.
He will take the wine to a cold place, a place of power, where the Jewel-Eyed Folk fear to linger. Glathfrap will spill the wine there as an offering.
The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small. They are few. They do not now have a god.
But if they give offerings, they will gain favors.
Offering by offering, they will raise a god of their own. And then the shadows will be kind to them.
Oh yes. So very kind indeed.
VII
You don’t need to be as exquisitely careful with a little spell for near-vicinity teleportation as you do with a spell for traveling through time.
You don’t. You just don’t. Why would you? The logic just makes sense. You don’t! In any case, Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, doesn’t have the full use of his limbs or his usual vocalizations to work any corrections, so ... it has to be fine! It’s all fine. The plan is working. That’s what his plans do, even if they sometimes meander. Lots of good things meander. It is generally agreed that rivers are good things. Everyone loves them and they do very little except meander. So.
Anthar-Kaladon has recently moved again, into a new wall, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built forty or forty-five centuries ago, and he tells himself that he is not worrying, he is merely dissecting the theoretical boundaries of any potential difficulties for his own amusement while his plan meanders to its inevitable triumph. He can set aside the disheartening suspicion that he might have accidentally inverted himself once or twice during his teleportations, which would mean that his current direction of progress might not be progress at all. However, that would be bad, which of course means it can’t be happening. Likewise, that minute burning thread of apprehension that he might now coexist simultaneously with several versions of himself, separated by just a few yards of dirt and stone, moving in separate directions both physically and temporally, well, that is also best described as mere conjecture. What a disaster that would indicate! Unthinkable.
Something scuttles nearby. Goblins. Not conjecture. Sadly thinkable. Goblins for sure. Stack them up with the petty undead, the gleam-snakes, the Glass Devil spiders, and the freebooters from the surface. This labyrinth will need a good cleaning when he sets himself loose, a good cleaning for-
Anthar-Kaladon’s head is wet.
At first, he thinks he is mistaken. Then he merely hopes he is mistaken. But no, his head is definitely wet.
Someone has poured wine into the cracks and crevices of the floor above. The wine is trickling down upon his immobile form.
Why ... why would the goblins do that? Of all things, why would they pour wine on him? This indignity is getting out of hand.
Anthar-Kaladon continues intoning his next teleportation spell. Oh, let it take him somewhere useful this time!
VIII
Lunch long past, the fighting moves on. Blood stains the floors and spatters the walls, too much blood. Many ordinary people-volumes of blood. But deep-delving adventurers are far from ordinary. They have spells to sustain themselves, and restorative lineaments, and every manner of healing concoction and decoction and salve. Every time a cruel spider-fang pierces mail, they drink potions, and every time a rot-rimed skeletal hand tears flesh, they drink potions, and every time an ancient trap drives spikes or flames or scything blades into them, they drink potions, and they laugh, and their zest for danger burns as hot as ever and they smash the empty vials of their life-preserving substances on the stone floor behind them. Leaving a trail of blood and bodies and broken glass, they move the battle as drunks might move a party once a particular tavern has been drained of good kegs.
Behind them come the gleaners, of course. But before the gleaners appear, there is the softest whisper of tiny bodies sliding slickly across the stones.
Pharmagast snails are little larger than a human fingernail, shell and all, and they are not slow. In a place like this, relaxation ends family lines. Pharmagasts don’t think that abstractly, of course, nor can they reflect on what time and necessity have done to their glistening lavender forms, which is equip them to survive on the dregs of the alchemical substances that dungeon adventurers litter their surroundings with. Eyestalks nervously swiveling, mouths eagerly pulsing, the pharmagasts climb inside busted phials and suck residues from glass, just as they drain the last thin whiffs of magic from wax stoppers, corks, clay shards, and discarded leather pouches. By the time the footsteps of the approaching gleaners shake the floors, the pharmagasts have vanished back to their crevices, leaving only a faint and fading phosphorescence in their slime trails to mark their revitalization.