soon as Malmor and the other overseers weren’t watching. And hunger and toil soon dulled his wits into something about as useful as the miserable gray slop he had to fight for at each meal.
Magic, of course, would have helped him to escape easily. But the Weave remained dull and distant, so much so that Jack began to fear that it was somehow completely absent in the dark elves’ domain, or that his long imprisonment had completely numbed his ability to perceive it. Whenever the overseers weren’t watching (which wasn’t often) he tried every spell he knew, with the same result-he waved his hands, he babbled some nonsense, and nothing happened. And, naturally, if any overseer caught him skulking off to do nothing, a beating followed immediately.
In the rare moments when Jack discovered enough energy to take note of his situation, all he could manage was a sort of confused indignation. Someone was the author of his misfortunes, but he had no idea who, because he couldn’t remember a thing about how he’d come to be entombed in the mythal stone. “A man can be measured by the quality of his enemies,” he told himself, “and clearly I had many formidable adversaries.” He knew, for example, that the ever-prying, ever-suspicious Knights of the Hawk blamed him for a number of thefts and escapades in the noble quarters of Raven’s Bluff. Jack didn’t see why they should trouble themselves about such things when he went to great lengths to spread his depredations around a large number of wealthy folk, none of whom were greatly injured by any one burglary on his part; his attentions were certainly no more onerous than ordinary taxation, and they didn’t set the Knights of the Hawk on tax collectors, did they? That, of course, suggested the possibility that one of the city’s thief guilds had arranged for his abduction to remove him as a rival, but that, too, seemed unlikely. Guilds were highly imaginative in their methods for dealing with freelancers such as Jack, but entombing him in a magical rock a mile below the surface seemed overly … subtle.
“Subtlety is the hallmark of a wizard,” Jack mused aloud when next he resumed his deliberations. The fact that he was magically encysted rather than simply bricked up in an alcove was clearly a sign of arcane talent. Therefore, it seemed likely that his unknown adversary was a wizard of some sort. Three potential culprits sprang immediately to mind: Zandria, the Red Wizard who had often threatened Jack for meddling in her affairs; the mysterious Yu Wei, the wizened old Shou who served the Warlord Myrkyssa Jelan; and the dreadful necromancer, Iphegor the Black, who so far as Jack knew consented to serve no one. If Jack were to be honest with himself, all three had good reason to act against him. Jack had been the principal actor in the defeat of Myrkyssa Jelan’s plot to infiltrate Raven’s Bluff, frustrating the master plan of Yu Wei’s liege-lady. He’d raced Zandria to the prize of the Guilder’s Vault in ancient Sarbreen, capturing the most valuable treasures before she recovered them. And it was unfortunately true that Jack might have had some small part to play in the untimely death of Iphegor’s dearly beloved familiar, which had taken the form of a rather small and frail mouse. The necromancer’s failure to provide himself with a sturdier companion was hardly Jack’s fault, but Iphegor might have seen things otherwise.
Zandria, Yu Wei, or Iphegor? Or the Knights of the Hawk? Or some hitherto unknown enemy? Someone was responsible for the fact that Jack now stood knee-deep in rothe dung, driven to exhaustion by vicious dark elves and their even more vicious slave overseers as he slowly starved to death, and the more he thought it over, the more the sheer injustice of the thing angered him.
The worst part of it was that his antagonist had likely been dead for decades. Even if he somehow managed to escape from his current thralldom, he could do little to set the matter straight other than perhaps dumping a bucket of rothe dung on the grave of his deceased enemy-a purely symbolic act, and not at all as satisfying a redressal as he might hope for. “It’s said that living well is the best revenge,” he finally resolved. “Fair enough; the course of my retribution is clear.” The sooner he could leave the fields of Chumavhraele behind him and enjoy life in some civilized place again, the better.
With a sigh, he picked up his shovel and attacked another pile of rothe dung.
One day (Jack had discovered that there was, in fact, a “day” of sorts in the dark elves’ fields and mines, marking mealtimes and rest periods) the tedium of his routine was broken by a commotion in the stockyard close under the battlements of Tower Chumavhraele. Jack was engaged in filling a cart with dung for transport back to the fields where the mushrooms that served as rothe fodder were grown when a gang of hobgoblins marched out of the great fungal forest, driving before them a score of human men and women. Most of the other field-slaves paused in their work to stare at the procession; Jack decided that it was safe to follow their lead and indulge his curiosity, so he lowered his shovel to watch.
“What is this?” he whispered to the slave working alongside him, a stoop-shouldered dwarf named Hargath, who had so far ignored him-a better treatment than Jack received from many who worked under Malmor’s supervision.
“New captives,” Hargath replied. “The slavers catch ’em up top and bring ’em down here to sell to the dark elves.”
The prisoners were a sorry sight, indeed. Some were injured, limping along or nursing bloody gashes and ugly bruises. Most were in their smallclothes, although a few had managed to keep a torn shirt or a ragged pair of breeches around their waists through the long march down from the surface. They bore their misfortune in a variety of manners, some stoic, some weeping and pleading, a few glaring about in anger. Jack’s eye was drawn by one fine-looking young woman with short-cropped hair of midnight black and a proud, defiant set to her shoulders. Her brocade dress suggested that she came of a well-to-do family, or at least had before falling into the slavers’ hands. She and her fellow prisoners were all bound with iron manacles, which in turn were fixed in staggered pairs to a great chain that all the captives together had to carry. The hobgoblins-no, actually, some of the slavers were human, Jack noted-jeered and cursed at their prisoners as they rearranged them into ragged lines to best display them for sale.
“What will become of them?” he asked the dwarf.
“Who cares?” Hargath muttered. “Some for the fields, some for the tower kitchens, most to the mines and tunnels, I guess.”
A small party of drow emerged from the castle and came out to meet the slavers. Jack recognized a few of the guards he’d seen patrolling the edges of the paddocks and fields, including Varys, the one who’d beat him for speaking on the day he first arrived. A priestess in the black and silver garb of the demon-queen Lolth led them. The priestess eyed the captives with a grudging nod, and then turned to one of the human slavers. “These seem better bred than the wretches you typically pawn off on us, Fetterfist,” she said. “I am impressed; they might actually last a tenday or two before keeling over.”
“My wares are largely a matter of chance, my lady, but sometimes opportunities arise,” the human slaver replied. He was a tall, bony man with a lantern jaw and long yellow hair that escaped from beneath a curious leather cowl obscuring the upper half of his face. “On most occasions I ply my trade in cheap winehouses and squalid slums, but yesterday I fell on a careless merchant caravan a few miles outside of town. There are no consumptive doxies or shiftless drunkards here; these are strong, healthy drivers and porters.” He paused and cleared his throat. “Of course, my expenses were higher than normal, and I must charge accordingly for these.”
“Your expenses are hardly my concern,” the drow priestess observed. She poked at the shoulder of a sturdy young man who stared down at the ground.
“Ah, well. If you will not make an accommodation for goods of exceptional quality, I suppose I’ll return to my customary methods,” Fetterfist the slaver replied. “There’s no point in paying for a large crew to bring you quality goods if I can’t make up the difference in costs at the time of the sale. I’ll be back in a few days with a lot of the typical quality, which I’ll be happy to sell you at the customary price.” He motioned to his men, who began to push and shove the captives back into marching order.
“Wait a moment,” the priestess objected. “Where do you think you’re taking these?”
“Back to the surface, of course. I know a pirate of the Inner Sea who would be happy to take them off my hands.”
Jack smiled at the slaver’s skillful shrug of resignation. The fellow knew a thing or two about bargaining, it seemed, which likely came in handy in his sinister vocation. He very much doubted that Fetterfist had any pirate acquaintance waiting to buy whatever the dark elves wouldn’t take, but the priestess had no way to know that. The suggestion brought a sour glare to her ebony countenance.
“I think not, Fetterfist,” she snapped. “The captives stay here. If you don’t care for that, you and your men can join them.”
The tall slaver smiled beneath his cowl. “Then who will bring new stock to your doorstep next month, or the
