The Ironroot Deception

  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 th
ey 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.