Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

Soft summer flatbread, liver-and-oat sausages, baked yams stuffed with crackling black pepper pods, cinnamon pie, and straw-colored sweet wine: this is Yrmegard’s contribution to the endeavor, and this is as close as she gets for the midday delivery. Mullion and Tylo and her aunt’s cousin’s friend Arna might poke about in the dark as if they were lunatics themselves, but when Yrmegard brings the catered luncheon, it goes down by rope and she remains in daylight. The thought that one of these days she might hear the last fading screams of those below is both frightful and just the slightest bit secretly attractive-a scold loves nothing more than to have their habits validated (and anyway, Yrmegard’s aunt’s cousin has a lot of friends).

“Hey! Hey up there!” The waiting lunatic has received the basket and started pawing through it.

Yrmegard peers down. She thinks the figure below might be the sorceress, though she doesn’t recall the woman wearing red robes. With a start, she realizes the clothes are drenched in fresh blood. The adventurer seems completely unbothered. “What is it?” Yrmegard shouts.

“There’s supposed to be wine with this!”

“There is!” Yrmegard massages her temples. Last thing she needs is lunatics clawing back coins from their accounts, claiming nondelivery when she knows full well she set a cool clay jar of the stuff in the basket not a handful of minutes ago. Yrmegard might fantasize about some memorable horror erupting below, but the hard truth is she needs the money, same as everyone. “Had it fallen from the basket, surely you’d have caught it right in the face, so it must be there! Look again!”

VI

Success is sweet! The shadows are kind! Success sets the heart to beat-beat-beat!

The treasure is heavy. Oh, the treasure is heavy. But that’s the price of great success!

Or so Glathfrap tells himself. He doesn’t have much experience with great success. None of the Jewel-Eyed Folk do, trapped as they are between the big creatures that come down from the daylight to smash and slay and loot, and the even-worse things that lurk below.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small, they are few, and they hide to stay alive.

But they are quick.

Today, Glathfrap reached from the shadows as the big creatures lowered the food basket from the too-bright world above. Today, Glathfrap was quick!

Now he rolls his prize along a scuttleway of the Jewel-Eyed Folk: a jar of wine almost as big as himself. He can hear it sloshing, would love to taste it, to share it, but there is an even more pressing need.

He will take the wine to a cold place, a place of power, where the Jewel-Eyed Folk fear to linger. Glathfrap will spill the wine there as an offering.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small. They are few. They do not now have a god.

But if they give offerings, they will gain favors.

Offering by offering, they will raise a god of their own. And then the shadows will be kind to them.

Oh yes. So very kind indeed.

VII

You don’t need to be as exquisitely careful with a little spell for near-vicinity teleportation as you do with a spell for traveling through time.

You don’t. You just don’t. Why would you? The logic just makes sense. You don’t! In any case, Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, doesn’t have the full use of his limbs or his usual vocalizations to work any corrections, so ... it has to be fine! It’s all fine. The plan is working. That’s what his plans do, even if they sometimes meander. Lots of good things meander. It is generally agreed that rivers are good things. Everyone loves them and they do very little except meander. So.

Anthar-Kaladon has recently moved again, into a new wall, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built forty or forty-five centuries ago, and he tells himself that he is not worrying, he is merely dissecting the theoretical boundaries of any potential difficulties for his own amusement while his plan meanders to its inevitable triumph. He can set aside the disheartening suspicion that he might have accidentally inverted himself once or twice during his teleportations, which would mean that his current direction of progress might not be progress at all. However, that would be bad, which of course means it can’t be happening. Likewise, that minute burning thread of apprehension that he might now coexist simultaneously with several versions of himself, separated by just a few yards of dirt and stone, moving in separate directions both physically and temporally, well, that is also best described as mere conjecture. What a disaster that would indicate! Unthinkable.

Something scuttles nearby. Goblins. Not conjecture. Sadly thinkable. Goblins for sure. Stack them up with the petty undead, the gleam-snakes, the Glass Devil spiders, and the freebooters from the surface. This labyrinth will need a good cleaning when he sets himself loose, a good cleaning for-

Anthar-Kaladon’s head is wet.