“Tongue is delicious,” it said in Common, speaking from lips tinged blue by cold. “Never had lizard tongue.” The slaver tittered.
Krailash glanced around. The stone men had vanished, merging back into the walls. Two of his men, Ramsey and young Lukas, appeared to be dead. The others were being tended by Alaia, who was quietly praising their bravery. He pointed to Morris and Hemingwood, the two who seemed least harmed and said, “You, watch the other tunnels. We don’t want to be surprised again.” Returning his attention to the derro, he said, “Do you want to live? Or do you want to end up like your fellows here?”
The derro shrugged, ice crystals showering from its shoulders, seemingly indifferent to the death all around it. The creature actually yawned, and its breath was all mushroom reek and carrion stink. Krailash struck it across the face with one of his great mailed hands, and the derro spun and fell to the ground, breaking the tendrils of ice that held it to the tunnel. The derro rose, still tittering, blood running down its face from a broken nose. “Are you my father? He used to hit me just exactly the same way.”
“I want to know where you take the slaves you capture,” Krailash said.
“Did you lose a little boy? We didn’t even have to hunt him. He came here and fell in a hole. Like a gift from above for the Slime King.”
Krailash wondered if that was some dark deity, or a title taken by whatever crazed monster led the derro, or something else, but it didn’t really matter. “I will have him back,” he said. “Or I will destroy every member of your filthy race. Do you understand? Does that penetrate your lunacy? You haven’t taken some jungle-dwelling savage this time. You’ve stolen someone with powerful friends.”
The derro’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “A valuable slave then. Our savants will be pleased. Perhaps they’ll send you little pieces of him on feast days.”
Krailash took the creature’s tiny neck in his fist, but didn’t squeeze. Not yet. Withholding that pressure was difficult, but Krailash was a being of iron will. “I will crush the life out of you.”
The creature shrugged again. “You aren’t above in the bright day now, lizard-man. You’re in our world, in the dark, on the doorstep of the Far Realm. You will suffer. You will be consumed.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Krailash said, struck by an inspiration. “We have a psion who can pry open your mind and find all your secrets. We’ll know everything you know within the hour. We’ll just take you to the surface-”
The derro began to flail so violently that Krailash almost lost his grip. Seizing the slaver by both arms-he wriggled like a live eel-Krailash grinned, showing his triangular teeth. The mention of the psion hadn’t frightened the creature. But the mention of the surface … “The sun is very bright up there, you know. In the jungle? It is merciless, and bright, and the sky goes on forever.”
“It’s night now,” the creature whispered, its eyes wide. “I’ve been to the surface before. I go to steal people away. It doesn’t frighten me.” The creature’s trembling gave the lie to that.
“But you go at night, don’t you? In the hours before dawn. And you always scurry back to your hole before the sun comes up. Have you ever seen the sun? It’s a great eye of fire in the sky. I can cut off your eyelids and stake you out on the ground so you have to stare up at the sun.”
“No!”
Krailash shrugged. “Once my psion empties your mind, why not? As good a way as any to dispose of trash like you.”
The derro closed its terrible eyes. “I can take you. To the slave pens.”
“You can, and you will,” Krailash said, and bound the slaver’s hands with its own iron shackles.
When Alaia and his remaining four men were ready to move again, Krailash nudged the derro with his boot. “Lead us,” he said. The derro showed him a trapdoor in the floor, and Krailash managed the tricky feat of descending an impossibly long ladder above a shackled prisoner held on a chain leash. The rest of the party followed him down, the spirit boar flickering and reappearing at the bottom of the shaft.
“Which way?” Krailash said when the path at the end of the shaft dead-ended at a corridor running off to the left and right.
“Left,” the derro said. “Nothing the other way but pit traps and grell.”
Krailash had spent many years in dungeons during his youth, and he had no fondness for either of those things, assuming they really waited down that tunnel. He wished the psion-what was her name? — were here. Her kind could sense a lie. “If you’re not telling the truth, the rest of your life will be very short, but it will also be so unpleasant that you’ll wish it was even shorter.”
The derro shrugged and inclined its head to the left. Krailash nodded. “Men, two of you in front of me. Alaia, if you’d stay behind me. And two more men to cover the rear.”
They walked in silence, Krailash’s head brushing the low ceiling. Eventually the derro stopped, nodding to a patch of porous orange stone. “Wormrock. Practically alive. Grows fast, so we use it to hide our passages. We just need to dig through here.”
Krailash frowned. “If you brought Julen this way, then surely it hasn’t had time to grow back yet.”
The derro tittered. “He went right. Fell in a pit trap. That’s how they caught him. But this is the fastest way to the pens. We might even beat him there. Wouldn’t that be nice for you? Get there before they decide whether to eat him or make him a mushroom farmer or give him to the Slime King as a toy?”
Krailash gestured. “Cayley, Fallon, Morris, Hemingwood-break through this rock.” The guards, all seasoned men who’d served with Krailash for years, obligingly stepped forward and hacked with their hand axes. The wormrock crumbled easily, leaving behind negligible piles of dust, and it wasn’t long before they’d chopped their way through into another tunnel, that one vast, easily seventy feet wide, roughly-gouged and streaked with dark black and red patches that Krailash wanted to believe was some cave lichen, but which looked much more like ancient dried blood. “What is this place?” Krailash said.
“We call it the Causeway,” the slaver said, and tittered. “It’s the cause of no end of trouble. Some great monster crawled through here, clawing its way through the rock, in the long long ago. Left a path so wide and broad and clear that fools think it’s safe.”
Another titter, and Krailash cuffed him on the side of the head.
“Just lead.”
They followed the Causeway for more than an hour, the passage angled steeply down all the while. The derro muttered about all the things that might kill them, and no number of cuffs to the ear or hissed orders could make it shut up for long. The sense of impending danger was so intense that Krailash began wishing something would attack them, just to break the tension. Spending too much time in the dark could make one go mad, Krailash thought. No wonder the derro were insane.
“Welcome to the depths,” the slaver said at one point, and giggled. “No more simple Upperdark for you. No basements or mineshafts or quarries or pitiful surface scratchings in the earth, no, no. We’re two miles down, at least, and some of the things that live here think the sun and stars are just stories told to frighten children. Can you feel the wonderful weight of all that stone above us?”
“Shut up,” Krailash growled.
Finally, after another long period of silent trudging and tense watchfulness, their prisoner pointed to a dark mouth of stone off to one side. “There. That’s the passageway.”
The hole was narrow enough that Krailash wasn’t sure he’d make it through without a pickaxe to widen the way, but by twisting his shoulders, he shoved his body through. He dragged the derro in after him by its chain, and pushed it to the front. The others filed in and gaped around. They were in a cavern obviously carved over centuries by long-gone flowing water. Bulging crystals emerged from the walls, some of them glowing with faint purplish light, and towering stalagmites rose from the floor. The party continued into the cavern for a while, and the slaver got more and more agitated as they went. “This way, this way!” The derro bounced on its heels, so eager to move forward that Krailash immediately feared an ambush, and tugged its chain, drawing it up short.