over the worst patches of muck. Slimy walls outlined the shapes of ancient buildings surrounding the mythal stone’s plaza. Jack couldn’t imagine why anybody had built a city on the bottom of a lake, but then he realized that the lake’s level must have varied significantly over time. When he’d been here a hundred years ago (and that was a thought that made his knees go weak), the lake had clearly been much fuller. He didn’t remember seeing old buildings on the lake bed then, but perhaps they’d been buried in muck or simply hidden by the murky water. The ancient drow had built their city here when the shore was dry; the lake had flooded at some point afterward and remained that way through Jack’s first visit to the site; now the lake had fallen, revealing the old city again. Given the scale of the excavations and the miserable slaves toiling to clear away the muck, Jack decided the drow had drained the lake deliberately. But why would they care about old ruins?
“This all seems like a great deal of trouble,” he said to the guards escorting him, waving an arm to indicate the ruins. “If I may ask, what is the point of the work?”
The guards turned on him, eyes narrowed. One stepped forward and drew a long, supple baton from his belt in a single motion, flicking it across Jack’s upper arm with whiplike speed before Jack could even register that he was under attack. The sharp
“Damn it!” Jack wailed. “Was that necessary?”
The baton flicked again, and this time slashed him across his left knee. Jack crumpled to the ground. The baton was more than simple wood; it had a rasping, almost sticky feel to it, and a fierce burning sting began to rise up in the welt it left behind. “I said, do you understand?” the drow guard shouted.
“Yes,” Jack replied. Seeing the drow’s hand draw back for a third blow, Jack cringed. His arm and leg were afire where the stinging rod had touched him. “Yes, master! Yes, master. I understand!”
“Speak again before we get to the fields and we’ll beat you until you can’t walk,” the second guard said. “And if you can’t keep up with us, you’ll wish we’d killed you instead. Now get up, slave.”
Jack pushed himself to his feet, not daring to say another word. Dresimil and her brothers had struck him as reasonably well-mannered people, not remotely as bloodthirsty and barbaric as drow were reported to be. Granted, they’d taken a certain cruel pleasure in his unusual predicament, but he knew plenty of surface nobles who might have done the same. But now that Dresimil was done with him, he was just a slave … and evidently the drow weren’t in the habit of wasting courtesies on their chattel.
The guards escorting him set off again, and Jack hobbled after them, determined not to provide either with an excuse to strike him again. They passed out of the ruins into a belt of gigantic mushrooms the size of trees, into a forest of pale gray fungi on the floor of the vast cavern. A crew was at work sawing a fallen stalk into the slick gray planks he’d seen in the ruins-naturally, the drow wouldn’t have easy access to the trees of the surface world- but Jack carefully kept his questions to himself. The path led through the fungal grove to the gates of a great dark castle, which loomed over the cavern floor. Weird globes and twisting streamers of eldritch light danced along the ramparts and spires of the structure, which seemed to have been carved from a ring of enormous stalagmites. Here, before the gates of the castle, the guards turned onto a path leading to a stone-fenced paddock lying beneath the castle ramparts. Jack became aware of a heavy animal stink in the air, a charming combination of dank fur, dung, and crushed fungus.
They halted before a crude bunkhouse or shelter of stone, mud, and moss. “Malmor!” the guard who’d struck Jack called. “We’ve got a new dung-shoveler for you, Malmor.”
There was a thick, snuffling grunt, and then a huge, shaggy figure appeared in the shelter’s doorway. Its yellowed skin was covered in lank, reddish hair, and a vast belly sagged over its ill-fitting leather breaches. The creature-a bugbear, Jack thought, although he’d never seen one so fat-bobbed his head and grinned crookedly at the drow guards. “Good, good, masters. I have much work, much work. But I do not like the looks of this one, no, no. Too small, too small, too thin, I think. He seems a shirker to me, a shirker he seems.”
“That is hardly our concern now,” the second drow guard said.
The bugbear Malmor approached and poked Jack with one fat finger. “I will have to keep an eye on him all the time, all the time. Easier to kill him now.”
“If Matron Dresimil wanted him dead, she would have killed him herself,” the guard Varys replied. “If you have dung in need of shoveling, have him do it. Otherwise, work him as you see fit, but do not kill him.”
The bugbear flicked a spiteful look at Jack, but bowed and simpered to the dark elves. “Dung I have in plenty, masters, in plenty. It shall be as you say.”
“Good,” the dark elves said. They threw Jack to the ground at the bugbear’s feet, and marched away back to the castle.
Jack picked himself up and started to brush himself off, only to discover that he’d already encountered his first rothe patty. He grimaced in disgust, but Malmor only laughed. “Don’t trouble yourself, no, no,” the bugbear said. “By the end of the day you’ll wear it from head to toe no matter what you do. Now follow me if you want a shovel.”
Jack sighed, and followed the bugbear.
CHAPTER TWO
How long Jack Remained in the Rothe paddocks he couldn’t begin to guess. In the sunless gloom of the Underdark, there was no dawn to mark the start of a day or sunset to end one. Time simply passed in dull, shapeless hours of toil. Malmor worked him to exhaustion; he would collapse in some stinking corner of the mushroom-cluttered fields, sleeping fitfully until discovered and kicked awake. At long intervals, surely a full day of the surface world, other slaves were sent to the kitchens beneath the brooding drow tower to bring back pails of bland gray porridge to the paddocks. And then it was back to the never-ending work of tending the dark elves’ herds.
Jack soon learned to loathe the rothe, the dark elves’ cattle. They were shaggy, stinking subterranean musk-oxen that devoured huge amounts of fungi Jack never would have imagined to be edible by anything, and soon enough turned that fungi into equally huge amounts of foul droppings. The creatures were not as large as surface cattle, standing little higher than Jack’s breastbone, but they were solidly built; well-armed with sharp horns; and very, very strong. Worse yet, they were far less stupid than they appeared, and possessed an aggressive, sullen temperament. The first time his meager meal of porridge was brought to him in the fields, two of the creatures ran him off from his pail while a third, clearly the ringleader, knocked it over and lapped up Jack’s lunch.
Naturally, he bent his every effort to absenting himself from the situation as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the drow and their trustees were well aware that he might not voluntarily remain in their service, and supervised him with maddening thoroughness. Whenever Malmor wasn’t in sight, one of the lesser overseers working for him kept an eye on Jack: Two-Tusks the orc, a rabid gnoll called Karshk, the hateful dwarf Craven, or one of the other boss-slaves who watched over the captives working in the paddocks. Jack discovered that Malmor and his thugs had an uncanny gift for anticipating him; whenever slaves were sent to work in distant enclosures of the rothe paddocks where a captive might be tempted to make a run for it, the overseers never failed to pull Jack out of the work party for duties close at hand. When field-slaves were sent to the castle to draw pails of porridge, Jack always seemed to be the last one to learn that food was available and consequently drew the meagerest portion. Soon enough Jack’s limbs trembled from weakness, and the aromas of dripping roasts and potato-filled stews came to haunt his dreams.
Jack had always imagined that a long period of forced servitude might offer a clever-witted and resolute fellow such as himself the opportunity to rise to his circumstances. His enemies might believe they had broken him, but still the fires of vengeance would smolder in his heart. In the most wretched of circumstances he would naturally find the keys to his eventual freedom: discarded tools that could be cunningly hoarded to improvise weapons or disguises, the slow establishment of camaraderie and trust with fellow-prisoners who could help him on his way, the inevitable appearance of patterns in the guards’ activities that he could exploit in a cunning plan. In the bards’ stories such things always came to wronged prisoners who persevered in their toil … but not to Jack. He was beaten severely whenever he touched anything that wasn’t a shovel. His fellow-prisoners (a motley assortment of orcs, wretched human or dwarf slaves, goblin rabble, and worse) hated him and clearly intended to murder him as
