“No. Stop.”
Xujil looked over at the dwarf questioningly.
“They will have more of the gas spores. The water is no barrier to them, unless we are farther out.”
Greddark whirled, causing the boat to rock unsteadily. His brown eyes blazed with barely suppressed fury.
“You are about two very short breaths from being thrown overboard, so my recommendation would be for you to stop speaking while you still can. Bad enough you lead us into a virtual ambush with those-what do you call them? Chitines? Then you bring us into a forest of living mushrooms and don’t bother to tell us that they might not take kindly to us chopping down one of their big brothers. And all the while, you manage to avoid getting a scratch on you while friend after friend of mine falls. So you’ll pardon me if I’ve decided I’m done taking orders from a coward.”
Xujil blinked at him.
“The warforged was correct; the chitine cavern was empty when I reconnoitered it. And the myconids are normally content to stay rooted in place. They did not attack Donathilde and her men; I had no reason to believe they would attack you. But if you are implying that I want you dead, I could have accomplished that feat at any time, while you slept,” the drow said bluntly. “What reason would I have had for bringing you all the way down to the Deeps, when I could easily have slit your throats in the Shallows, if that had been my intent?”
“Well, considering you like to keep duergars as slaves and murder infants, who knows? Maybe it’s what passes for fun down here.”
“Ah,” Xujil said, nodding. “So that is the crux of your dislike. The child.”
“It’s definitely not a mark in your favor.”
“We have been at war with the Spinner of Shadows since before you of the surface began manifesting the mark of the dragons. Before that, we were enslaved by the giants and suffered their enduring cruelties. Our enemies are implacable and unrelenting, and always have been. They would not hesitate to exterminate us, given the chance, so we cannot hesitate either. The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy.”
“But the people of Trent’s Well weren’t your enemies,” Sabira said, disturbed to find herself unable to fault the drow’s cold logic.
“A fact we did not discover until it was too late.” He looked at her, and shrugged helplessly. “Our magic may be different from yours, Marshal, but not even we can change the past.”
Greddark scoffed.
“I can’t believe you’re buying that,” he said to her in disgust. Looking at Xujil, he narrowed his eyes. “Just stay away from me, drow, or you’ll find out that no one does ‘implacable and unrelenting’ better than a dwarf. Now stop rowing.”
Shrugging again, the guide obeyed. Greddark rummaged around in the packs at the bottom of the mushroom boat until he came up with a light crossbow and a clip that held five bolts. Setting them aside, he dug in his pouches until he came up with the vial of sulfur he’d scraped from the canyon walls at Zawabi’s Refuge, and another half-filled with a thick red liquid. He unstoppered both vials and carefully shook half of the yellow powder into the liquid, which Sabira guessed was some sort of oil. Then he replaced the corks in both, secreted the sulfur back in his pouch, and shook the remaining tube vigorously until the powder had completely dissolved, turning the liquid a rich carnelian color. Then he unstoppered it again, poured the concoction over the heads of the five quarrels, and loaded the clip into the crossbow.
“What are you doing? What good are five crossbow bolts against a few hundred of those?” Sabira asked, jerking her head toward the shore.
“Sulfur,” the artificer replied, picking up the crossbow and sighting it carefully, “mixed with certain types of oil, creates a potent fungicide.” Then before she could respond, he pulled the trigger, three times in quick succession. “For Skraad. And Rahm. And Zi.”
The bolts flew across the water, thunking into the pseudoflesh of three of the largest myconids.
“Sovereigns,” Xujil murmured, and by his tone of grudging admiration, Sabira knew he wasn’t calling out to the Host. “They lead the colony. If they fall, it falls with them.”
“Good,” Greddark said, firing twice more, this time at two gas spores that hovered over the edge of the water. As the quarrels struck home, the spheres exploded, showering their fellow fungi with the dwarf’s creation. “Might take a few days, but by the time we get back here, we shouldn’t have to deal with them again.”
“What have you done?” Jester asked in a shocked voice, the first time he’d spoken since they left land.
“What I had to,” the dwarf replied shortly, attaching the crossbow to his belt, opposite his sheathed alchemy blade.
“But… to destroy the whole colony…?”
Greddark looked up.
“They’re not people, they’re fungus. And even if they were, like your drow friend here said, ‘The child of my enemy is also my enemy, and deserves no more mercy,’ ” he said, and Sabira wondered if he realized that he hadn’t just repeated Xujil’s words, he’d mimicked both the guide’s tone and inflection perfectly.
They rowed in silence after that, paddling far out onto the lake until they could no longer see Gharad’zul behind them and there was nothing but cold, black water around them on every side. Sabira lost her bearings quickly, but neither Xujil nor Greddark seemed concerned. She decided it must be living underground that gave the two races their innate sense of direction. Apparently, it wasn’t just a dwarf thing. It was also a drow thing. Or at least an Umbragen one.
She almost chuckled at that, but quickly recognized the humor for what it was-an inappropriate but understandable reaction to the sudden deaths of so many of her companions.
She’d lost comrades-at-arms before; you couldn’t have lived through the end of the Last War without seeing someone you cared about die. She’d even lost more than three on one mission-or even six, if you counted Laven, Glynn, and Guisarme. But the difference was that then, she’d at least been able to strike a blow against the ones who’d killed her friends. This time, she hadn’t even had a chance to fight back. And, of course, before, those men hadn’t been under her command.
These had.
She had to remind herself, again, that she’d forced no one to join her on this mission. They’d come of their own accord, judging the rewards to be worth the risks. And if they’d gotten far more of the latter than the former, that was not her doing.
None of which, however true, gave her even the slightest bit of comfort.
She found herself wishing suddenly that Elix were here. As a captain of the Sentinel Marshals, he’d had to deal with losing men, even with ordering them to their deaths. It was something every Deneith soldier trained for, but that few ever had to actually face. She knew Elix wouldn’t be able to make the pain or the guilt go away-that was her burden, the price of command. But he’d at least be able to show her how not to hate herself for it.
And as she thought it, she wondered if that’s why she’d balked at the idea of marrying him. Not because she wasn’t good enough for him-no one was, and besides, who in love ever truly thought they were worthy of that love being returned by the object of their affection? No one who actually was, surely.
No, that beautiful betrothal bracelet and everything it represented terrified her because it was a partnership of the most intimate kind, and one thing you learned early in her House-and especially as a Marshal-was that no partnership lasted forever.
Partners got reassigned, or quit. Or died, usually in horribly painful and gruesome ways. Or maybe that was just her partners, but then, that was sort of the point, wasn’t it?
It had happened to every partner she’d ever cared for-Ned, even Orin. She didn’t want it happening to Elix. Especially not because of her.
As if summoned by her thoughts, a vision of the dark-haired captain sinking below the surface of that magma pool swam before her eyes, quickly morphing into one of him aflame and being buried under a rising tide of fungus. She blinked the sight away and stared out over the black water, straining to see something, anything other than the man she loved dying over and over again in increasingly awful ways.