“No one sees the king while the king is the king,” Zaltys said. “I think we’re okay, assuming we can get upstairs without being killed. I wish we could kick this whole mess of greenery into the water, but it would be like trying to kick an orchard. I wonder if my mother left you the knife? It seems a bit primal, but I can’t imagine she’d have let you come down here if she’d known what we had planned.”
“We’ll ask her when we make it to the surface again.” They walked around the pool and unlatched the heavy wooden door. The guards outside didn’t pay them any attention as they emerged. Presumably the sentries were meant to keep people from going in, and had very little interest in whether anyone came out. The savant who’d led them downstairs was still on the ground, possibly dead, though the robe of eyes was gone. Her skin, pale as curdled milk, was covered in strange tattoos, also of eyes, but they were all closed, lids and long lashes drawn down.
Zaltys and Julen stepped over her gingerly and went up the stairs. They reached the hall of miniature kingdoms and tried not to look into them, but a voice called from the first one they passed. “Humans!” it shouted, and they looked in to see Bug-eater seated in an ornate (if chipped) gilded throne, his feet propped on a dead derro he’d arranged into a sort of corpse foot stool. “Was your meeting with the Slime King all you’d hoped?”
“Very informative,” Zaltys said. “Have you renounced your vow of incomprehensibility?”
“I am the lord of all I survey, excepting the hallway,” he said, “and so it behooves me to make myself understood. Would you like to come in for dinner? There’s a crack in the wall swarming with beetles. They taste a bit like gecko and a bit like bat and a bit like human.”
“Thank you. Perhaps another time.” Zaltys gave him a little bow, which Julen hastily copied, and Bug-eater waved at them in lofty dismissal.
An array of screams and grunts and the scrape of metal on bone emerged from the other rooms, but none of the other little kings called out to them as they went past. They ascended the far staircase without incident and emerged into the grand museum hall, which was strangely deserted. As they hurried among the exhibits, they saw why. One of the portals to the Far Realm, near the forge, was birthing a monstrosity of lashing tentacles, and all available derro had gone to man the nets to drag it down.
“If Iskara reveres things from that place so much, why does she capture them?” Julen said.
Zaltys shook her head. “I think Iskara is after something bigger. She mentioned something the size of a world with eyes. And she seemed to have contempt for these other aberrations. Didn’t you tell me aboleths are possibly the oldest things in the universe?”
“So I’ve read. Do you think Iskara’s just insane? That she’s trying to open portals for something that doesn’t even exist?”
“Maybe,” Zaltys said. “But it’s not something I’d care to risk. I wish there was a way we could close these portals. It’s a shame they didn’t close when you killed Iskara.”
Julen frowned. “Did I kill her, though? She was wrapped up in vines, yes, but is that enough to kill something as old and powerful as she seems to be? Or did we just trap her?”
“That’s a happy thought,” Zaltys said. “Let’s hurry and free the slaves and get out of here before we find out whether’s she’s dead or only inconvenienced.”
“All right, we’re probably looking for something near the mushroom fields, but those were vast, they fill almost this whole cavern, so where do we start-”
The pale snake came slithering down the steps, curled around Zaltys’s feet, and looked up at her. Zaltys stared at it.
“Ah,” Julen said after a moment. “Are you talking to the snake?”
“No,” Zaltys said. “I can’t do that, as far as I know. I’m just thinking. Trying to figure out whose pawn I am, exactly, and how I can be sure the next move I make is my own.” She flicked her fingertips at the snake. “Go on then. Show me the way to my family, or go away forever.”
The snake lowered its head and began undulating across the square, and Zaltys and Julen followed.
“I don’t understand,” Krailash said, staring at the portal, and the terazul vines. “The plants-they come from another plane?”
“A plane so alien that just a glimpse of it strips sanity from the mind like corpse beetles tearing flesh from a dead body,” Alaia said. She was sitting on the ground, and her spirit companion appeared to be asleep, two things that made Krailash profoundly uneasy. “And we’ve been selling people potions and powders made from a flower rooted in that plane. The visions people have when they take terazul tinctures, the energy and strength they feel when they ingest the powders, the madness that certain addicts fall into-the ones we call weak, the ones we’re so careful to blame for their own downfall-they’re all gifts of horrors from the Far Realm. What if the vines aren’t plants at all? What if they’re the tentacles of some ancient slumbering creature drifting through the infinite layers of the Far Realm, and the flowers are something like hairs, or warts, or fingernails? What if we’re strengthening the power of aberrations in this world?” Alaia drew her fingers down her cheeks, so hard her fingernails drew blood, so it appeared she was shedding red tears. “What have I done, Krailash? I’m a shaman. Defender of nature, servant of the primal world and peddler of poisons from a place inimical to everything I thought I believed in.”
“I’ll chop through the vines,” Krailash said, lifting Thunder’s Edge, though practically speaking, the problem was more difficult than that. The portal through which the plants emerged hovered near the cavern wall some twenty feet up, and he wasn’t sure he could climb that high, as the wall was distressingly smooth.
“No,” Alaia said sharply. “Kill those vines, and you reduce our family’s fortunes by half at a single stroke. If word got back that I was responsible for the loss of supply, everyone in my family would turn against me. I would be stripped of my position, and even my name, shunned and exiled. You know family is everything to me, Krailash-you can’t do this. And with no terazul, there’s no need for Travelers. What would become of you?”
Krailash shook his head. “But you said it yourself, they’re from the Far Realm-we can’t let them continue to poison the world!”
“There’s the world,” Alaia said, with a small shrug. She reached out and touched her spirit companion’s head, and seemed to address her next words to the boar. “And there’s family. I’m a Serrat. I will always choose family.”
Her spirit companion stood up, looked at her with wide-eyed sorrow, and shook its gray head. The spirit boar took a step, and then another, and seemed to walk out of reality enitrely, leaving no trace behind. The shimmering curtain of sparkles and shadows that covered them abruptly dissolved. “Alaia,” Krailash whispered. “What happened?”
She shrugged again. “I made a choice. As a shaman, I am a defender of the natural world from outsiders and aberrations-shamans exist, in part, to combat the influence of the Far Realm. If I can’t do that, if I choose not to do that, how can I be a shaman? It’s a good thing I’m incomprehensibly wealthy and a skilled administrator, because I’m not a shaman anymore.”
“What do you mean? The primal world has forsaken you?”
Alaia laughed bitterly. “The primal world doesn’t notice me, it’s not conscious, it’s just power. But …” She made a sad grasping motion with her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers. “Now that power is like smoke. I can still sense it, but it’s receding, and when I try to let the power flow through me, it slips through my fingers. I think I’ve forsaken it. In truth, it’s been harder and harder to access my abilities with every passing year. Too much time spent in cities. Too much time putting things other than the fate of the world and nature itself first.” She shook her head. “And now it’s all gone. If we’re going to get out of here alive, it will be based on your strength as a warrior.”