Chapter One: The Snare

Gad feels the roughness of the burr-oak’s bark as its branch constricts tighter around his ankles. Though he is upside down, blood rushing to his head, his face retains its symmetry. A roguish skiff of stubble softens his jutting jaw. Gray-peppered hair clings closely to his scalp. Blue eyes sear out at his elven captor.

The tree that dangles him stands at the edge of the Shudderwood. Its roots snake through a weed-choked pathway. A gang of firs bullies around it, swaying and trembling to spite the windless air. The dry earth writhes with insect life; biting ants and fat white grubs pulse to the demon harmonics of the nearby Worldwound.

The elf woman steps around him, squinting. From every angle, she assesses the tautness of his muscles and the straightness of his bones. The tree reverently moves its suspended prize, allowing her to circuit him easily. Her hair is an autumn tangle, recalling the sprigs and leaves of a grapevine after harvest has come and gone. The face is an arrangement of hardened planes: beautiful in theory, unyielding in practice. Her war-garb is worn in, well kept. Slung across her back are a long sword and an ornate, spiraled wand. A curved dagger accentuates a narrow hip.

“There are few situations that Gad can’t talk himself out of. This appears to be one of them.”

Behind thin, drawn lips, she clucks her tongue. “Among your fellow humans, you are reckoned handsome.”

Gad smiles. “I look my best right side up.”

She does not return the smile. “You will serve,” she says.

“Will I now?”

With a curt turn of the head, she gestures to her retinue, gathered near a camouflaged ambush-screen on the treeline’s edge. There are six of them: all elves, all strikingly equipped, all poised with martial confidence.

Gad’s weapons—short sword, main dagger, hidden back dagger, visible right boot knife, concealed left boot knife—have all been plucked from him and lie in a mocking pile near a clump of dying milkweed.

“And who might I be serving?”

“My name is none of your affair.”

“Maybe I like serving.”

Elven features freeze. “Do libidinous undertones aid you with your fellows?”

Gad finds it hard to shrug. “A gentleman never tells.”

“You do yourself no favors by provoking my disgust.”

Again the urge to shrug. Gad resists. “You wouldn’t be press-ganging me, would you?”

“Humans have forgotten their purpose on this world.”

“Have we now?”

“You were born to brute labor. And you shall perform it.”

“I don’t work cheap.”

She signals her men. The tallest, most sinewy specimen, glossy black hair trailing behind him as he strides, leads the pack. Wrist shackles clatter in his compact fist. He lowers his head as he approaches. “Lady Dualal.”

“Good Ethundel,” she says, “prepare the labor for transport.”

Nothing about Ethundel looks good to Gad.

Dualal turns to the tree trunk and utters a command in archaic Elven. Its encircling branch loosens, releasing Gad’s ankles. Two members of the retinue stand below. They catch him, saving him from a neck-breaking. Holding him tight, they wrestle him to his feet. Ethundel claps the shackles on him.

“I renew my objections to this wrongful treatment,” Gad says.

Ethundel smacks the back of the head.

A faraway expression settles on Dualal. “If it is matters of justice that concern you, wanderer, your indenture furthers the most righteous of causes.”

A white-blond elf grabs Gad by the right arm; an amber-blond elf by the left. They march him onto a deer trail leading into the woods.

“Care to specify?” Gad asks.

“Reclamation,” Ethundel booms.

Gad ignores him, continuing to address the woman. “Oh, so you’re one of those elves.”

“Impertinence will be harshly dealt with.” Dualal glides forward, to the middle of the marching order.

In the wood ahead, branches grow twisted and tangled. Keening cicadas assault the ears.

“Haven’t you Reclaimers been plotting this for nine thousand years?” Gad braces for another hit but neither of his escorts seems interested in breaking stride. Ethundel, who struck him before, has moved up to take point. With no one to clout him, Gad continues: “Ridding Golarion of humankind—and dwarves and orcs and the rest—and taking it back? That’s the dream, isn’t it?”

“You are surprisingly versed in my race’s lore,” says Dualal.

“Isn’t that a misleading way to put it?”

“What nonsense do you spout?”

“Don’t most elves regard the idea of reclamation as lunacy?”

She whirls to face him. His escorts freeze, shying back from her. Gad stays cool.

Dualal sees this. She calms herself. A false, chill smile comes reluctantly to her lips. When she speaks, it is more to her men than to Gad. “It has never been the time to reassert our ownership of this profaned and polluted world.”

“Until now?”

She gives him her back, resuming her regal mien.

“Have you considered, Dualal,” he says, “that it’s quite the coincidence?”

“What is?”

“That after all the other Reclaimers have failed and been proven wrong, century after century, that the great turning happens to dawn during your particular lifetime?”

“But it will!” blurts his amber-haired captor. “The gem!”

The elf’s pallid skin turns whiter still, as he realizes he’s stuck his foot in it. He flinches.

“Put a gag in that idiot’s mouth,” Dualal commands.

Gad protests and resists as blond elf and amber elf stuff a mildewy rag between his teeth. Inside, he is smiling. When an adversary thinks him an idiot, half of his work is already done.

∗ ∗ ∗

The Reclaimers drag him deeper into the forest. Gad is easier in a city than a wilderness, and this one is worse than most. Clouds of bloodthirsty bugs roll in like morning fog. A caustic oil drips from the leaves of certain trees. Unearthly murmurs, mimicking the groans of the tortured souls, rise from rills and meadows. Life is too strong in the Shudderwood. So strong that it is also death, a rancid cycle of birth and devouring.

A day and a night pass. They camp briefly, giving Gad four hours of sleep at best. The elves, rotating watches, get less. They feed him dry acorn-flower biscuits and a handful of crab apples. His head swims. When he slows, they prod him with scabbarded swords.

The biting bugs are worse the second day. With wrists in irons, he can barely swat them. His skin becomes a landscape of reddened, scabby bumps. Paying little heed to the elves’ legendary harmony with nature, the insects feast on them, too. They spare only Dualal and Ethundel, who must benefit from some salve or charm. If he weren’t gagged, Gad might work the lackeys, making hay of the gap in privilege between leader and led. With his mouth tied shut it’s all moot.

He thinks they’ve edged back to the border of the haunted woodlands again, but can no longer be sure. When they’re stopped for a short break by the side of a glassy stream, the conversation of another party drifts by. With silent efficiency, the Reclaimers grab Gad, fading behind a low ridge of mossy stone. The musicality of the overheard words is unmistakably elven. Clearly, the Reclaimers expect the local sharp-ears to treat them as interlopers. Gad waits for a chance to make the move he’s been planning, but the opening never comes. His captors wait until the voices recede, then continue on.

A few hours later they hunker down again. Blond and amber stay by his side; the rest slip off through the firs. Gad mimes a request to get the gag off. They refuse him. He listens in with his barely passable Elven as they ponder which regions of the world they’ll claim when Dualal rules the world.

They’re arguing over the island of Absalom when the rest of the group tramps into view, dragging a new prisoner. The fresh unfortunate is male, human, young, and scrawny. A wiggle of drying blood runs from his scalp into a matted sideburn.

Gad seizes the moment of distraction. He bolts up, clouting the amber elf’s temple with the edge of his shackles. Dodging slippery rocks, he bursts into the forest depths. Elven curses ring through gnarled pines. Uneven terrain adds effort to his flight. Gad’s heart hammers; he gasps for breath. He stops to ease the gag from his mouth.

From nowhere, Ethundel is upon him. A fist catches Gad in the throat.

“Thought these woods would protect you, against an elf?”

Gad whirls back. He crashes into a tree. Pain throbs through his shoulder and down his side. He tries a double-handed swipe. The black-haired elf leaps gracefully back. With Gad off balance, he barrels in and kicks Gad’s feet out from under him. Gad goes down, falling onto a rotting log. Ethundel aims a series of savage kicks at his legs. Gad holds up his bound hands. Sadism spasms across the elf’s face. He grabs Gad by the back of the skull and crushes his face into the log.

“I give!” Gad cries.

“Now you supplicate? After mocking and profaning our mistress?” Ethundel punches Gad in the neck and steps back to draw his sword. “I don’t care how well you haul a rock. It is unfortunate that in my attempt to subdue you, I was forced to draw steel, and underestimated the strength of my blow.” He raises the blade.

“Ethundel! Stay your sword!”

The black-maned elf is not the only one who can move through a woods at a preternatural pace. Dualal stands a dozen yards off. She looks down on the scene from a leaf-strewn slope.

“Milady,” Ethundel stammers.

Fir needles crunch underfoot as she draws nearer. “Your ardor is understandable. Humans are insufferable. This one more than most. They are also, in these woods, a scarce commodity. He who kills his thrall destroys his own property.”

Ethundel visibly swallows. “Yes milady.”

“We have two now. These will replace those we exhausted. Let us go now to the Ironroot, and resume the dig. When he has served his purpose, he is yours, to treat as whim decrees.”

Ethundel dips his head and sheathes his sword.

At Gad’s side now, she reaches down to grab the gag, still around his neck, and pull it up into his mouth. “And you. Do not count on a second reprieve.”

Ethundel hauls him back to the others. The amber-haired elf greets him with a sullen stare. Before long, they are back on the trail. The new prisoner hasn’t been gagged, but is too frightened to attempt a conversation.

Scrapes and contusions from Ethundel’s beating gnaw at Gad as the elves push him on. He mimes his need for water. They let him linger for a while before slaking his thirst. They slog on past dusk.

The party is in a clearing when a thunder of breaking branches rises from a dense throng of pines. Tree trunks crack and topple. A throaty roar reverberates.

A creature leaps into the clearing, a wake of shattered wood fragments billowing behind it. Gad has never seen its like. It is a ball of quills and claws and fangs, ten feet high and as many wide. Its legs are pillars of muscle. As much as it seems like some unknown animal, it is also like a plant, festooned with vines and sprouting leaves.

It bounds, snarling and frothing, toward the elves and their prisoners.

Chapter Two: The Hole

On massive, clawed legs, the forest-beast bounds toward the elves and their captives. Its beady eyes, shielded by rootlike extrusions, seem to lock onto Gad. It stops to snort and paw the ground.

Gad can’t help but wonder: why him?

It can’t be that he’s the only human present. There are two in the press-gang now.

Then he understands: he’s bruised and limping from the thrashing Ethundel gave him. He reads as the weakest prey.

Dualal’s lesser subordinates pose for flight. Ethundel preempts them, sweeping his sword from the imposing scabbard mounted on his back. “For you, milady!” he bellows. Meadow-grass churning beneath his boots, he runs for the forest-beast. It shifts its attention to the shouting warrior. It charges. Ethundel stands ready to pivot when it reaches him, but misjudges its speed. It butts him full-on. His wiry body flies into the air. He lands with a thud. The creature, spraying leafy sputum, rears to crush him beneath elephantine feet.

Ethundel rolls, seizes the hilt of his dropped sword, and stabs up into the beast’s scaly belly. Gouts of pulpy blood gush from the wound. The elf reaches to withdraw his stuck blade. The creature bucks away before he can grasp it. Ethundel pulls out a dagger.

Finally shocked from their daze, his comrades rush with drawn longswords to join him.

Dualal remains in place. She reaches for the spiraled wand strapped to her back. Green energy swirls up the spirals to collect around its globular tip. With a snap of her wrist, Dualal lobs the gathered energy into the air. It arcs onto the creature’s back.

The beast freezes in mid-leap. Its position insupportable, it thumps over on its side. Dualal calmly ambles over to it.

The elves have left Gad and the second prisoner on their own.

“Let’s go,” the young man says.

Gad shakes his head. “They’ll catch up,” he says, words muffled by the gag.

The creature isn’t breathing. The wand’s magic has stilled even its involuntary reactions. Dualal, impassive, watches it suffocate. Even in death it remains rigid.

“She wouldn’t use that on us, would she?” the prisoner asks.

Gad points to his mouth, as if to say, I can’t answer, I’m wearing a gag.

∗ ∗ ∗

For several hours Ethundel leads the party deeper into the wildwood. Signs of corruption grow ever more frequent. The ground cover becomes a slick fungal mass. Blackened spores swell the surfaces of rocks and boulders. Bloated insects the color of corpse-flesh hang like bats from withered branches.

Clustering firs give way to an expanse strewn with vine-choked logs. These thin out as the group trudges into a vast circle of dead vegetation. Diffuse smoke rises from a fire ahead. Temporary shelters, fastidiously constructed from scrap wood, huddle on the edge of a pit. On its lip, elven archers—Gad counts three of them and assumes there will be more—stand with exaggerated ease. Their weapons point down into the hole.

Ethundel seizes Gad by the back of the neck and shoves him onward. He hisses into Gad’s ear, his breath hot and vaguely sweet. “Here’s where you learn humility, churl.”

The pit has been quarried from an earthy soil thick with chunks of shattered limestone. Ethundel manhandles Gad toward its edge. A treacherous ramp composed of loose gravel leads down into the pit. Ethundel means to steer Gad short of it, to heave him directly into the hole. It’s a fifteen, maybe twenty-foot drop.

“Good Ethundel!” Dualal warns. Ethundel snarls, changes course, and jostles Gad onto the ramp. The prisoner stumbles, recovers, and slides down to its floor level without twisting an ankle. He contemplates the connection between the elf leader and her chief bullyboy. Not lovers, he decides: It’s the wrong kind of heat. It smacks more of an unbidden, unexamined mother-son pull. Perhaps between a mother who has never had a son and a son who has never known his mother. Gad stores the theory for later use.

He surveys his new surroundings. Dried meal coats the side of an empty gruel-pot. Heaps of dirt and gravel periodically shed their pebbles. Planks of fresh-cut deadwood cover a deeper hole in the pit’s center.

A dozen prisoners sit in exhausted stupor on hard-packed dirt. Shackles bind their ankles. They are pale, undernourished, water-starved. Eleven humans, three of them women, and a female halfling. Gad gives himself a plausible interval, and checks to see that none of his captors are looking, before seating himself next to the latter.

It hurts to see her in this state. Under chosen circumstances, Vitta would be impeccably turned out. No matter how deep the dungeon, she’d be powdered and rouged, her clothing spotless, her hair piled and secured by an intricate copper lattice. Grime coats her forehead. Her usually plump cheeks have sunk.

“You all right?” he asks.

She stares ahead, speaking without moving her lips. “Remind me again why I got volunteered to get caught first.”

“Your expertise in matters subterranean. Your mastery of traps, engineering, hazards…”

“An annoyingly correct answer.”

“They’ve been putting you to work?”

“Also remind me, once this rip is over, to never lift another rock.” She steals a sideways glance. “You got kicked around some, too.”

“Got to sell the gaffle.”

“It’s a shame to see Vitta in such a state, but she’s the only halfling for the job.”

“Speaking of which,” she says. She lifts a flat, chalky stone. Beneath it lies a torn rag tied into a bundle. Vitta pats it, eliciting the telltale sound of cut gems rubbing up against each other. “Rubies. Found them down in the works. Behind a locked panel no one else saw.”

“Dualal naturally insists that all swag is turned over to her, to disperse as she deems fit.”

“Naturally. You’ve got that look.”

“What look?”

“That look that says we’re not going to get to keep these.” Vitta replaces the stone.

“We’re here for the big steal.”

“This little steal could feed a village for a year.”

“Not that you’d use it for that.”

“Who would?”

His expression kept safely flat, Gad laughs.

“Bad tidings,” Vitta says, shifting her eye-line to guide Gad’s gaze.

Ethundel has taken aside one of the humans. Unlike the others, this man wears no shackles. He towers above the elf warrior, outweighing him by fifty pounds of muscle. He’s all jaw and naked cranium, framing a pinched and narrow face. The elf speaks into his cauliflowered ear. He nods obediently.

“That’s Stokh,” says Vitta.

“Let me guess. Jailhouse stooge.”

“There’s always one,” says Vitta.

“Ethundel has taken a dislike to me.”

“Inexplicable.”

“Looks like I’ll have to watch my back.”

“So nothing new, then.”

Stokh breaks from Ethundel. He attempts to be subtle as he assesses Gad.

“Better break for a while.”

Vitta hobbles away from him. Half an hour later, when the elven guards are inattentive, they drift back together.

“Want the breakdown on the complex?”

“Sure,” says Gad.

“Two thousand years old, give or take. Definitely elven. Not purpose-built, but a reuse of an existing structure. The room forms are organic. Shaped as if the roots of a gigantic tree withdrew to somewhere else, leaving behind a hollow. It’s all wood and earth, eternally suspended in a state between dead plank and living plant.”

“What did they use it for? The elves who built it, or grew it, or whatever?”

“Originally? Vaults. Probably a treasury and armory. Quite a full one, judging by the size of the place. There’s royal crests everywhere.”

“Whose crests?”

“Am I an expert on the heraldry of second-millennium backwoods elven royalty? You should have brought Calliard.”

“He’s not to be found. And yes, I also hate small-team rips. But there’s a limit to the number of captures we could believably fake.”

“I’m complaining, not re-airing the plan,” says Vitta. “At any rate, the complex. Maybe sometime after it was first excavated, it became a shelter for noncombatants in a time of war.”

“Something has to be going badly, for elves to live belowground.”

“That’s understatement for you. And then its last use: Like we thought, a prison. To keep something in, and to prevent any bunch of later fools from letting it out. Once they had it sealed in, they laid in a gaggle of impressive traps and filled the whole thing up with rocks and dirt.”

“You figure they got the plants to do that for them, too?”

“No, they did it by hand. Whatever’s in there, they truly wanted it to stay.”

“And you reckon it did?”

“If it got out, it was through tons of tightly packed debris, not to mention some very impressive traps.”

“So preferably, we steer well clear of it.”

“Preferably,” says Vitta.

∗ ∗ ∗

In the morning they are roused with sword-butts. Elven guards kick them until they stand. They remove the prisoners’ shackles, clanking them into a heap. The longer-held captives know what to do: they pull the boards from the hole within the hole.

“Down you go,” the amber-headed elf commands.

The prisoners form a queue. One by one they descend into a shaft, climbing with the aid of precarious spikes thrust into stone and root.

“We want to be near the front,” Vitta tells Gad.

He edges in, with Vitta right behind him. The others are happy to give him his berth. The forward part of the job is evidently the hardest and most hazardous.

Stokh sees him and pushes his way into the line, too. The wretched captives seem surprised. Gad guesses that he doesn’t generally take point.

The shaft takes them twenty feet down, where it meets a narrow tunnel. Metal buckets line the passage.

Stokh shoulders Gad into the rocky wall. He presses, pinning him there. “You’re not going to cause trouble here.”

“Why do you care?” Gad demands.

Stokh stinks of brandy, a provision not granted the other prisoners. “We’re nearly there. Then the elves let us go. Safe. Don’t you ruin it.”

Before Gad can reply, Stokh storms down to the head of the procession.

Ethundel is up ahead.

Gad strides up behind Stokh. He waits. Then speaks: “Hey, bald-head. What liberties do you allow the elves, in trade for that brandywine?”

At first Stokh is too shocked to move. He recovers, turns, and swings a knobby fist. Gad ducks. He pushes into the bigger man. Stokh grabs him and shoves, pushing Gad into Ethundel. The elf withdraws, stiffening in revulsion.

“Cease this now, louse-ridden scum!”

Gad slips past to catch up with Vitta.

Stokh’s outraged breathing fills the passageway.

The tunnel jogs to bypass a formation of hard quartz. Vitta grabs Gad by the back of the tunic. He stops short before brushing a section of quartz slathered in a wet, gluey substance. Above it juts a copper spout, now stuffed with rags. A man’s corpse, mummified by the glue, adheres to the rock.

“Glue trap,” says Vitta.

“I can see that,” says Gad.

The passageway abruptly ends. Its rough terminal wall grants room for four laborers to have at it with pick-axes. Vitta takes an axe for herself, and hands another to Gad.

“Welcome to the hole,” she says.

They dig, freeing stones, releasing cascades of dry soil. Other prisoners scurry up to gather the debris into buckets. They send it brigading down the passageway, each bucket passed from hand to hand.

They toil until they’re dizzy and ready to drop. Their captors dole out miserly portions of water and gruel. When workers waver, the swordpoints come out.

By the time they’re allowed to stumble from the excavation, night has fallen. Gad staggers to the wall of the outer pit and collapses. Sleep takes him immediately.

When he awakens, it is with Stokh’s steely fingers around his windpipe.

Chapter Three: The Dog

Gad’s feet scramble for purchase against a heap of gravel as the muscular prisoner chokes the life from him. Stokh grunts in surprise; Gad’s supposed to be shackled at the ankles. He tightens his grip. Gad’s arm flails into the gravel pile. He fishes out an object.

The burly prisoner sees the flash of metal and releases Gad in a twitch of panic. Knuckles white on the hilt of Ethundel’s dagger—stolen when he prompted Stokh to push him into the elf on the way into the excavation that morning—Gad neatly plunges it between the startled man’s well-demarcated ribs. He jams it in deep. He twists, forcing Stokh to cry out in pain.

Agonized cries resound through the pit. They cease as blood fills Stokh’s lungs. He dies to the sound of running elven feet. Gad steps out of Stokh’s path as his corpse timbers to the dirt. He slides to Vitta’s side, yards away. He presses his ankles together. Vitta slaps the shackles on them. Using a twig she’s carved, she clicks its tumblers, locking it. She stashes the twig in the rock pile, retrieving another item. When she sees that Ethundel has seized control of the scene and is barking orders to his fellow Reclaimers, she places it in Gad’s hand.

Ethundel rushes to Stokh’s side. He places fingers on his jugular, shakes his head, and rises. A red fury, so intense as to be visible in the weak light of predawn, suffuses his triangular face.

“Where is the new one?” he calls. “Where is the churl?”

Gad scrabbles back, catching his eye. The elf sprints at him, hauling him to his shackled feet. He backhands Gad across the face. Throws him against the pit wall. When he tries to knee him in the groin, Gad angles to avoid the worst.

“What happens here?”

At the slicing sound of his mistress’s voice, Ethundel stops. He throws Gad to the dirt. “The new one has murdered our best thrall. Our strongest, most loyal human.”

“They say that all the best leaders are a little crazy. By that metric, maybe Dualal is destined to rule.”

Dualal’s arched brow suggests that her admiration for Stokh ran cooler than her lieutenant’s. “Humans are vicious, Ethundel. They slay one another. The savage ones are oft of greater use than their docile brethren.”

Ethundel points at Gad. “And I shall slay this one.”

“And lose two slaves, instead of one?” says Dualal. “When we are a few day’s digging from our prize?”

“I warned him not to defy me.”

She laughs. “I’ve told you time and again, child, just because these creatures walk and talk, and seem capable of feeling, you must not mistake them for people. They are but snarling animals. If one dog tears another’s throat, it is not the fault of the dog, but of the negligent dog-keeper.” She sweeps toward Ethundel. “Why did you let my one good dog kill my other?”

“Milady…” Ethundel stutters.

“I raised you from nothing, and you are hard and brave, yet you haven’t the sense of a barnacle.”

Ethundel can see that his comrades are watching him.

“I didn’t even do it!” Gad blurts.

“What?” says Dualal.

“He says I killed Stokh, but it wasn’t me. Look! He’s stabbed. Do I have a blade?”

“Ethundel,” she says, “did you let the human have a dagger?”

“I did not!”

“Look!” says Gad, “the blood’s on his scabbard!”

The dagger is back on Ethundel’s hip. Returned to him when he was trying to knee Gad in the gobbles. Stokh’s sticky blood smears his belt and tunic.

Dualal’s hand snakes out at him.

In an unthinking defensive gesture, Ethundel’s hand lands on his guilty dagger-hilt. He immediately lets it go, as if it burns. His lips follow the rhythm of his unraveling thoughts. “He must have—no…”

“Give me that blade,” she says.

From her tone, Gad decides he guessed right. These two are like mother and son. But not truly mother and son. All the demands, none of the affection.

She pulls the knife from its sheath. With it falls a bundle wrapped in a dirty rag. It falls to the dirt. Glinting dawn light reflects from ruby facets. Dualal bends down to seize the purloined gems.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” she says.

“No.”

“I told everyone that any treasures found in the Ironroot Vaults were to be turned over to me. And you, of all my followers, you betray me?”

“I’ve never seen those before.”

“You, whom I elevated not for your strength, nor for your courage, but for your loyalty—you would forsake me for a handful of stones?”

She stabs him in the chest. He drops to his knees, more out of supplication than injury.

“Milady, it’s a trick, I would never—”

Dualal jabs the knife into his open mouth, slashing his tongue. “Silence, traitor!” She wheels to face the appalled ranks of her minions. Ethundel gags behind her. “Each of you will stab him once with his own duplicitous blade. I shall punish shirkers and light-strikers as I have punished him!”

One by one, they step up and meekly comply. Her lackeys slash at Ethundel enough to say they’ve done it. She wrinkles her nose in dissatisfaction.

“You there. Human,” she says.

“Me?” Gad asks.

“These elves are of the blood, yet have permitted it to run thin in their veins. We lost Golarion to you because we lacked your cruelty. To take it back, we must equal your barbarity. Teach my men a lesson, human. Show them what savagery is.”

She proffers the knife.

“Do it. I’ll reward you.”

Gad steps up and slices open Ethundel’s throat.

Imagining that he’s doing it to her.

∗ ∗ ∗

Days of toil pass, with no hint of Dualal’s promised reward. Each morning Gad and Vitta go down into the excavation with the rest of the press gang. Some days they break rocks. Some days they pass debris buckets down the passage or up the shaft. Every night they stumble from the complex, which they now know as the Ironroot Vaults, topple onto beds of gravel, and surrender to pain-wracked sleep.

Since his stabbing of Ethundel, the other prisoners come to Gad, as if, in killing the elf, he gained a measure of his authority.

They say:

“They’re going to work us to death.”

“My name is Saadak. I have a wife, three children, and another on the way. My death will be their misery, too.”

“If we’re still alive when they get whatever they’re looking for, they’ll slaughter us just for spite.”

“I am Barash, son of Barash. I was foolish to venture so close to the Shudderwood with my cart, but it is not a crime I deserve to be killed for.”

“I overheard her. They seek a gem that will prove her destined to rule the world. That can’t be true, can it?”

“I am Tlivush. That is my brother, Tliuka. It does not matter what happens to me, but if he does not return, it will break our mother’s heart.”

“There must be a way we can escape.”

“She thinks you’re her new pet or such. We beg you, sway her to ease up on us.”

It throws him off. Gad is used to leading, to calling the moves, but with confederates who are in on the gaffle. Responsibility for a pack of ordinaries is not part of the plan.

The next evening, as the end of the shift nears, Vitta’s ax opens a hole to a hollow chamber. She quickly returns the rock to its place. “The digging’s almost done,” she says to Gad.

That night, Gad sleeps fitfully. He dreams that Dualal is looming over him.

He awakens.

Dualal is looming over him.

She unlocks his shackles and takes him for a walk. They stroll up the slope out of the pit, to the dead forest beyond. “The other dogs gather around you,” she says.

“We prefer ‘human.’”

She turns to face him, as if worried that he’ll rifle her pack. “I said I’d reward you, and I will. Even though a sliver of me now suspects that you somehow abetted Ethundel in his betrayal.”

“That’s not so,” Gad says.

“Your people were bred to serve mine. You’ll deny it, but it’s true. Are we not older, wiser, more beautiful? How could we be supplanted by such as you?”

“It is a mystery.”

“I could use a loyal dog. A killing beast. Instinctively, the others yearn to follow you. Why is that?”

“Your thoughts rush swiftly. This poor dog can’t keep up.”

“When I rule… It is unrealistic to expect that we shall exterminate your race entirely. Many will remain. I must learn to command your kind. Yet my revulsion for you clouds my understanding.”

“You’re not too big to admit that.”

“Not at all.”

“What makes you think you’re going to be world-queen?”

“Do not mistake this moment of intimacy for weakness. Insolence shall still be punished. My visions say so. Since I was but a child, I have dreamed my future glory. I would fall into a trance, and recite epic stanzas of my eventual deeds. All the great prophetic poems of elvenkind refer to me, foretell my coming. Yet unbelievers, even other Reclaimers, refuse to see the obvious parallels in the texts. The prophets say that the great elf queen to come will find a gem, buried deep in the earth. Its light will shine on the elven people, curing them of their blindness. Forcing them to recognize me. I will unite the elves and fey of the known worlds, then the seven leaves will fall—but it is beyond your comprehension.”

“And that’s what we seek here—your gem?”

“Two thousand years ago came the first harbinger of my rule. The thornbeast. A terrible tripartite devourer: animal, mineral, vegetable. It scourged the elven kingdoms, seeking the queen too early, enraged by its failure to find her. The elves of this land finally captured it and sealed it in their own holy Ironroot Vaults. They could not kill it, so they left a powerful gem, the Opal of Command, to force its eternal slumber.”

“And the opal is your gem of prophecy.”

“Yes.”

“So what happens when you take it from its resting place? You release the thornbeast?”

“Don’t worry about that, good dog.”

∗ ∗ ∗

Gad asks the amber elf what his name is as he and Vitta smash through the last wall of rock to the open chamber beyond. The elf has time to snarl at him before the stones give way, collapsing into a tumble of rubble at their feet.

Darkness shrouds the chambers beyond. Vitta reaches for a lantern.

The amber elf stops her short. “Halfling! Go to the top, and convey to your mistress that the excavation is at an end.”

Gad steps lightly on her toe, to forestall the retort he can already hear coming. She stalks off down the passageway, squeezing her way past the row of bucket-haulers. “Drop your pails, boys,” she says. “Digging’s over.”

Soon Dualal and her best-armed guards have shoved themselves into the tiny terminal chamber. She peers into the black with her exceptional elven eyes.

“Shall I dismiss the thralls?” Amber elf asks. “We shall guard you, the rest of the way.”

“Yes,” says Dualal.

A hideous, hungry wail echoes from the depths.

Dualal whispers: “The thornbeast.” She swallows, then shudders back to composure. “On second thought,” she says. “The thralls may still be of use. To walk ahead, and alert us to hazards.” She turns to Gad. He expects to see a cruel smile but there is only blankness. She gestures to the pile of stones, and hands him a lantern.

“Proceed, brave dog, proceed.”

Chapter Four: The Beast

The weirdness of the creature’s distant cries washes over the prisoners like a crashing wave. The elves have arrayed themselves behind them. With swords outstretched, they impel the captives into the newly revealed inner chambers of the Ironroot.

Gad and Vitta are working their way to point position when Dualal chimes: “Not you, good dog. Nor you, halfling. You seem like you might be of more specialized use. You two, with the beards—you go first.”

She points a glossy nail at the two brothers, Tlivush and Tliuka.

Tlivush, the elder one, threads his fingers together and begs: “We are brothers, milady. Let him stay back, and I’ll bear the brunt of whatever risk—”

“Human, you should know your place by now. As a measure of my vexation, your brother shall walk ahead, and you’ll hang back.”

The elves hold lanterns for the humans. The final Ironroot Vault reveals itself as a succession of twisting tunnels. Every surface is wooden, whether covered in bark or exposed and lacquered. Feathery roots reach down from the ceiling. Thicker ones provide overhead passage for skittering mice.

When the vault branches, Tliuka wanders for the closest fork.

“Hold up!” Vitta shouts.

“What?” says Dualal.

“Up in the root structure,” she says, pointing above Tliuka’s head. “There are glowing sigils painted in the roots. A glyph trap.”

“Go the other way,” Dualal commands.

Shoulders hunkered, Tliuka complies.

“This isn’t right,” Vitta says to Gad. “I should be up there, not that poor serf.”

“Got an argument that doesn’t explain who you are?” Gad asks.

Vitta grimaces. She goes back to checking the ceiling and walls as best she can from the back of the shuffling scrum. The passage curves, slopes down, and curves again. They come to a set of roots, forming a rough staircase leading a dozen steps down. Vitta edges her way to the front of the crowd.

“Let the selected human walk the steps alone,” calls Dualal.

Tliuka freezes on the first stair.

“Walk lightly, my brother,” Tlivush calls.

One by one, Tliuka traverses the steps. He hits bottom and moves on down the corridor.

A grate of sharpened poles drops from the ceiling. It falls with speed and force, knocking Tlivush first to his knees and then flat against the floor. The poles impale him. He gasps and writhes. Vitta bounds up but there’s nothing to be done.

“Tliuka!” his brother cries.

Dualal bares her teeth at him. “Silence, thrall, or we’ll dig a grave for two!”

Tliuka dies at Vitta’s feet.

The portcullis bars their way. Dualal parts the group to inspect it. She rattles it, orders her men to chop at it with swords. It resists their blows.

“Halfling,” she says, “you seemed to know to look for traps, before. If you can find us a way through this, you’ll be rewarded.”

Vitta looks not at the portcullis, but at the ceiling and nearby walls.

“Ingenious,” says Vitta, squinting in the lantern light. “Though woven—or is it grown?—from roots, vines, and twigs, it still obeys the rules of winch and pulley. This tough fiber here is like the chain, and this notch is where you secure it. The weight-plate here, that Tlivush stepped on to trigger it: bark and wood. All of it still living. Or, if you prefer, ensorcelled into an eternal semblance of life. And this spiral of branches here, that duplicates the actions of a spring. Pulled tight, it imprisons a great measure of force. It is that captive force, when suddenly released, that made it fall so fast, and impaled poor Tliuka.”

Dualal sucks air between her fey-white teeth. “At another time, halfling, your disquisition might be interesting. Can you raise it up, and prevent it from falling?”

“I could, but will I?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you let all of us go, unharmed, when you get what you seek?”

“You will be of little use then.”

“Yes, that’s why I ask.”

“You’d be wise not to test me.”

“Do you want this up, or not?”

“I swear, you all shall be safely dismissed.”

“On your blood and the blood of your lineage?”

Dualal stiffens. “Yes, creature.” She gestures to Gad. “Save for this one. In him I see the potential for longer service.”

Gad sees a vituperation form on his comrade’s lips.

“Don’t worry about me, Vitta,” he says. “Accept her pledge, for you and for the others.”

“Give me a boost then,” she tells him.

He hoists her up. She hauls at a vine. The wooden grate lifts up, slipping wetly free of Tlivush’s impaled corpse. The prisoners groan as it rolls into view.

Vitta rearranges roots, ties a knot around a protruding burl, and leaps down to tear chunks of wood from the weight-sensing mechanism.

“You have rendered it safe?” Dualal asks her.

Vitta brushes bark dust from her palms. “I have.”

“Then onward.”

∗ ∗ ∗

“The thornbeast doesn’t appear to have much respect for would-be royalty.”

They turn a corner and the howls grow in pitch and frequency. Other sounds join its plaintive, angry wails. The unseen thornbeast roars, snorts, and slavers. A succession of thumps and frantic scratching noises suggest a creature struggling to escape.

Gad speeds up, intending to be the first to see it. A small cool hand lands on his shoulder, pulling him aside. It’s Dualal.

The creature is within view now. Gad sees it over Dualal’s shoulder. It is an ever-shifting thing, a mass of muscles, hide, quills, and teeth. It is a body arranged entirely around a deep, clashing maw. Its gums are granite; its teeth, serrated ivory. Green spittle sprays from its gullet; it reeks of new-mown hay. Hundreds of jagged thorns protrude from its back and the outer surfaces of its limbs. Blood-red fruits, compounded from bulbous drupes, dangle from its plated hide. It is like the frothing, charging issue of an impossible mating: part porcupine, part lion, part boulder, part bramble. The thornbeast is growth gone wrong, life defined as pure predation.

A web of verdant energy forms a seal between the passageway and the beast’s imprisoning chamber. Seeing Dualal, the thornbeast dashes toward it, and is stopped short. It stomps and bucks and froths.

At the very center of the web hangs an opal the size of a fist.

“Stand back, all of you,” she calls, face fixed on the gem.

The prisoners pell-mell chaotically out of the way. Vitta follows in their wake, though more cautiously, alert for traps they failed to trip on the way in. The elves step back only a few paces. Gad presses himself into a depression in the wall, between two trunklike columns.

“Join me in the chant, good elves!” she cries. Together they draw their arms away from their bodies, hands twisted into arcane shapes. She leads the ritual. An ancient, breathy ululation sings from her lungs. Her retinue joins her, harmonizing. The green, imprisoning web flickers.

The thornbeast grows still, as if calmed by elfsong. Meekly, it retreats to the far corner of its cell.

Dualal plucks the opal from the air.

The web vanishes.

The creature blinks. It realizes that it is free.

Gad’s throat constricts.

The creature opens its own, shrilling out its bloodthirsty anticipation.

Dualal reaches into her pack for her wand, readying herself to kill the thornbeast, just as she did its lesser cousin, back in the forest.

Gad steps from the alcove.

“Get back!” Dualal shrieks.

Gad reaches for her.

She clutches the opal tight. “You’ve come to steal the gem!” she realizes.

“No,” Gad corrects. “I’ve come to steal this.” He snatches the wand from her hand.

The amber elf leaps at him. Ready for his lunge, Gad pivots, throwing him. He lands at the thornbeast’s clawed, titanic feet.

Dualal’s elven retinue draws swords. Gad gets out of their way by pushing Dualal into a wall. The warriors rush to engage the thornbeast. It already has Amberelf’s right leg caught tight in its jaws. It ragdolls him back and forth, dashing his skull against the hard wooden wall of its cell.

Dualal stutters her incomprehension. “The wand? I need that to quell the beast.”

“I’m not sure it’ll work on that thing, and, more to the point, don’t care,” Gad says.

She struggles to get at her sword hilt but it’s wedged between her back and the wall.

“The wand?” she continues. “You came to steal the wand?”

With deft fingers Gad unbuckles her scabbard. “Yep.”

“The wand. Not the gem?”

“Nope.” Buckles loosened, he pulls the entire apparatus—sword, scabbard, and belt—from her.

“But it’s priceless! Invaluable beyond measure!”

“Maybe to your insane dreams of conquest. But I don’t know where I’d fence that. Whereas this remarkable wand of yours, unique on Golarion as far as I can tell —why, I have a buyer in Nerosyan lined up to pay a hundred thousand on the spot.”

Behind them, the thornbeast devours Dualal’s men. It crunches through bone and snaps off limbs.

Blinded by fury, Dualal scarcely notices. “You have betrayed me,” she hisses.

“You enslaved me first, so it all comes out in the wash.”

He pushes away from her, sword in one hand, wand in the other. She tries to pull her dagger. It stays stuck in its sheath. She withdraws her hand, pulling threads of glue with it.

“You remember the glue trap, back there?” Gad says. “Vitta saved some for you.”

“The two of you… confederates?”

“Elves aren’t the only ones who plan ahead.”

“But—but you are my dog!”

“Ruff ruff,” he says, backing up.

Once around the corner, he turns and sprints. An ill-cast spell whizzes overhead, scorching vine leaves, singeing his hair. He turns to point the death wand back at Dualal, having no idea what it might do to an elf rather than a thornbeast. She stops, flattening herself against a wall. He scuttles back to the preplanned point.

He nods to Vitta. Her expression fuses mock innocence with self-satisfied serenity.

She slashes a vine. The portcullis slams down, leaving Gad and Vitta and the press gang on one side, the elves stuck with the thornbeast on the other.

“Better go,” he tells Vitta. “She still has spells.”

“I forgot to mention,” the halfling says, “the portcullis coated with some kind of magic retardant. Impervious to spells.”

“Forgot to mention?”

“A randomly captured thrall can’t seem too knowledgeable,” she says.

The sounds of carnage flow down the passageway as the thornbeast finishes off Dualal’s retainers.

Dualal surges to the wooden portcullis, jutting her pale fingers through it. Ignoring Gad, she pleads her case to Vitta: “Let this up! Quick! The creature’s coming!”

Vitta puts hands on hips. “It’ll hold. For awhile.”

“But I promised you a safe dismissal!”

“Our freedom was never yours to grant.”

Dualal looks back with terror as the ripping and tearing sounds subside. “This is not in the prophecy!”

“I can’t help you with that one,” Gad says.

“But the thornbeast—it will run a-feasting through the Shudderwood, and perhaps beyond!”

“Three minutes ago,” he says, turning his back on her, “that was a price you were willing to pay.”

They are well into in the excavated passageway when they hear the beast pounce, all grunts and scrabbling claws. To her credit, Dualal barely looses a scream.

They surface expecting to find the prisoners waiting for them, seeking guidance back to civilized parts. Instead, the freed thralls are already gone.

“Hnh,” Vitta says. “They didn’t trust us.”

“In fairness,” says Gad, “no one ever should.”

Vitta nods her agreement. Without further repartee, they set out for Nerosyan, and the hundred thousand that awaits them there.