Bloom & Dark Read online

  “To be sure, Paladin—but this is a special lantern.” Odile gestured to it with her free hand. While I examined it as best I could before having to regain my grip upon the stolen trove of treasures, the elf went on, “Its light can be turned on or off with the twist of this switch, and in all my years I’ve never seen a thing Nightland creatures hate more. Misshapen—You are aware of those, aren’t you, human? Our perverted cousins, cursed with the bodies of spiders and the feral minds of animals—especially avoid it at all cost. I bought it from a friend who said she took it off the body of an adventurer.”

  “Then I’d venture a guess his light didn’t do him much good.”

  “Oh, it did, but it was she who felled him.” While I could do little more than produce a noise of plain displeasure, both durrow laughed. The elder one went on, “Come now! As though that sword of yours hasn’t killed plenty of men!”

  “None who were sleeping, or otherwise minding their own business.”

  “Don’t feel too awfully for him…she said he was a servant of Oppenhir, here for who knows what depraved art.”

  While I tried to decide whether I should be relieved or unnerved to think that even durrow were ill-disposed toward Oppenhir and his pale servants, Indra now took her turn to ask questions. She turned to study the sword I had insisted I keep on my person, thus adding to my load but proving comfort to my mind. “What’s the name of your sword, Paladin?”

  “Strife,” I answered.

  Odile laughed to overhear us. “Some name! Who wants to carry Strife around on their hip? Here I thought most of your kind named their blades things like Peace-Bringer or Oath-Keeper.”

  “Not at all…many of the legendary forebears we were taught about in the Temple of Weltyr carried blades with names like “Needful” or “The End.” To bear a weapon such as Strife is a great and solemn duty—an honor that reminds us it is no small thing to kill a man. Certainly not as much as it would seem to you.”

  Odile snorted. “Men are animals just the same as any other—women, too, though that opinion is less popular where I come from.”

  “We begin our lives as animals, yes, and these are animal bodies…but Weltyr imbues us with the sound and vision of consciousness, rather than that of mere creatures. After all—were I but an animal, or a creature like a misshapen or a spirit-thief, then your light would send me fleeing just the same as them. It’d send you fleeing, too, were you but an animal, Odile.”

  With a noise like the annoyed suck of a tooth and a muted scoff, Odile said, “Go on, pack mule, pick up your pace. You’re slowing us down.”

  That may have been so, but the journey was long and, after a certain point, treacherous enough that I couldn’t help but think it would not have mattered how slowly I went: one way or another, the task would have taken us the better part of the day, especially once we reached the city itself. Somehow, the vastness of El’ryh did not strike me as a possibility in all the times I’d heard of it. While I understood it to be the Nightland equivalent of Skythorn, the sprawling city where I was raised and trained, I somehow could not comprehend its size until I saw it for myself.

  As was the way with cities, however, we gradually met other travelers coming from it. The women greeted a female, this traveling on her own and geared for some subterfuge; soon we also crossed paths with another group of women, a chattering trio. At one point, in a narrow cavern, the elves drew me aside and we all waited to permit the passage of a tremendous black carriage being drawn by an enormous tarantula—this vehicle was being driven not by another elf but by a human man who regarded me with a sense of cold exhaustion before turning his eyes away and urging the spider on a bit faster.

  “Are durrow much in the custom of keeping male slaves, for pleasure or otherwise?”

  Indra answered for me. “Of course…it is Roserpine’s will.”

  “But what do your husbands think of this practice? Sure they must take exception.”

  While Odile laughed, Indra looked at me with an expression of puzzlement. “Husbands,” she repeated. “Our animal trainers?”

  “He doesn’t mean animal husbandry, Odile, although he’d might as well. It’s a practice aboveground…humans believe women untrained in the sword can’t take care of themselves as well as a man untrained in the sword. Husbands are proscribed to care for these women.”

  Scoffing, I assured them, “That’s not so—the bond of marriage arises out of love. It is a symbol of Weltyr’s love for the souls of mortals. What do you call it her—helpmates? Companions? Either way, matrimony’s not the slave-bond you would make it seem.”

  Odile laughed and shook her head. “We have no such structure here. Durrow come together and part as friends or enemies like the changing of the seasons. We live hundreds of years, human…can you imagine five hundred, six hundred years spent looking at the same face every bloom, every dark? And in the case Roserpine has meted out but a little life to us, when we’re to die in battle or of ailment, is that not all the more reason to fill the time with as many lovers as we can? Durrow do not feel ‘love,’” she insisted, noting some sign artfully drawn in silver painted upon the tunnel wall.

  I glanced up in time to see a list of required documentation for aboveground merchants bold enough to bear their wares here to the Nightland capital. Odile, now shutting off her lantern and leaving my pitiful human eyes to adjust to the low light of the natural bloom, went on to say, “We feel fondness for our friends and even sometimes for our slaves, but our hearts are hardened against deep feeling—love as you mean it. Attachment to this tangible reality severs our connection to Roserpine and only ensures that our passage into her arms will be painful.”

  “But surely you long for tenderness. Surely even durrow wish to have someone they know they can trust.”

  “I trust Indra,” answered Odile, “and that’s enough for me. Mind the top of the gate here, human…don’t lose your burden before we’re to the market.”

  At the threshold of a gate I struggled to see beyond the sagging of the tapestry over my shoulder, I could at least note a few details. First, the broad cavern leading to this particular entrance of the city was, nearer to El’ryh, hand-carved with designs as elaborate and beautiful as any I have ever seen.

  Once as a boy I was shown a dagger, its handle hand carved from the horns of plain-kings. Even though such an object implied the death of as great and sacred a being as those gigantic creatures were, I remember being wholly taken by the intricacy of the artistic carving of that ivory handle. The flowers and vines arranged down its length brought to mind some kind of netting, a mesh of bone; it was exquisite, and the decorations announcing entry to the underground capital brought it to mind in an instant.

  Next I noticed, to my surprise, that the city guards were female. Powerful women whose heights were a match for mine—truly these were giantesses among the delicate dark elves. They looked far more capable of battle than even Odile and grinned beneath the cages of their visor to see me.

  “What a find, sister,” remarked the one to the right, the only one I could see completely owing to the obstacle of the tapestry. “How much did you have to trade for that one?”

  “Only a little healing potion…good to see you…”

  With a wave, Odile crossed into the broad platform that overlooked the city and gave weary travelers a chance both to gather themselves and to enjoy the view of El’ryh. She yawned and stretched as though her journey were already up just on her entry. “Oh, home! What a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Look, Burningsoul!” Indra nudged me, smiling, and I grimaced while trying not to drop my burden. “Isn’t our city beautiful?”

  Though I lifted my head at her direction to humor her, I have to admit now that I was wholly unprepared to say El’ryh was, in fact, truly beautiful. Indeed, ‘beautiful’ was not the word to describe it—extraordinary, breathtaking. These would be more accurate descriptors and still not quite enough.

  The underground city was, in every way, an incredi
ble rival for Skythorn—even to the spire carved out of a central column towering from the distant bottom of the city to the glowing ceiling. The top of this cavern was painted so thickly in the phosphorescence of the bloom that now I understood far better the parallels between it and the light of Weltyr. Even my human eyes could see readily beneath this amount of light, this somewhat eerie glow that loaned the entire city a faint blue tinge.

  This, also, could have been the blue fire of the wisp torches that served as permanent lights throughout the city, tall upon their mounts so as to guide the way down long spiraling pathways carved from the walls. These paths were wide enough for perhaps fifteen to twenty people to walk side by side together; on the day of my arrival foot traffic was very light, but I could easily see how during hunting seasons and times of holiday or trade the path might become crowded and the gate, backed up with lines of people attempting to get in or out.

  And that was just my initial impression. I was so taken aback that I barely saw the lesser spires scattered around the city, rising up its countless stories. Each terminated at a height shorter than that of the central column but nonetheless proved to be quite impressive. All these, like the perimeter of the cavern, were packed with doors. Gradually I realized that though, with the onset of time, many handmade structures had filled the available space at the bottom of the cavern (almost invisible from where I stood for the sheer distance), these doors carved into the walls were surely many things—homes, shops, inns, taverns. All the amenities of life.

  I marveled, quite astonished by the vision, and wondered at the amount of time the initial settlers must have spent carving their domiciles. I supposed they did have much time on their hands, being elves. The entire effect made me feel as though I had stepped into a swirling hive of bees, and the deeper the eye followed the path of the highway down the cavern, the busier the activity grew. I could then only imagine just how packed its markets would prove when finally we were upon the cavern floor.

  “Well,” said Odile with a sigh and another stretch after a few seconds to appreciate the view, “come on, let’s go, don’t delay…the sooner we get down to the market, the sooner you can get that weight off your shoulders.”

  Thank Weltyr the road to the city was so broad—but it certainly could have been shorter. Had the ramp been carved any more narrowly I might have woven so much owing to exhaustion that I’d have tumbled to my death. Luckily, with Indra to my right to helpfully guide me and Odile before me to, if nothing else, serve as a point of focus, I managed to keep my swaying down to a minimum…though the dizzying heights and seemingly endless curve of the highway did not make it easy.

  We were on this new road, traveling from the height of the city to its depths, for at least the passage of an hour. Surely it was more, but by this time I was in a sort of fugue state and had no more energy for counting the minutes than I did for talking. While the durrow chattered among themselves I dodged passersby, focused on keeping the goods I hauled balanced, and did not realize until we were at the base of the spiraling path that Indra had every reason to be confused by my question about husbands.

  I did not realize until glancing across the sea of moving bodies that all durrow were female.

  This revelation was something of a shock and, at the time, I thought I was surely incorrect—surely the crowd simply blotted out my view of the delicate male elves among their female compatriots. But, no: as we dove into the throng, Indra behind me and Odile ahead of me, I found myself more shocked. Every durrow that we passed was, at least in body, feminine.

  “You don’t have men,” I remarked at last to Odile, who laughed at me. Not cruelly, but rather as a woman might at a naïve child.

  “Oh, we have them…men like you, men we’ve stolen or lured from the surface. But you’re right…durrow are not born as men.”

  Indra nodded. “The misshapen are said to come from a sorceress’s efforts to create a male durrow.”

  “Instead she managed to create a whole species of abominations! But I’ll give it to her…she did produce males.”

  Doing strange arithmetic in my head, I inquired, “But—reproduction—”

  With another laugh together, both women looked at me with fondness. Odile at last advised, “Warrior-priest—if all we required were slaves to labor and build for us, our magicians just as easily could create homunculi, or resurrect skeletons, or call up familiar helper-spirits for that.”

  Though it astonished me that I had never heard of such a thing before, now I understand why those aboveground kept this secret of the durrow closely guarded. On hearing about an exotic race of exquisite elves who were entirely female and wished to enslave men for purposes of insemination, what young man wouldn’t risk life and limb to deliver himself into the belly of the Nightlands? Many would lose their lives and many more would find, as I already had, that the general duties of a slave did not really compensate for the so-called privileges afforded one.

  Yet, there would still be those fools who would try, as a young man overflowing with fool’s bravado joins armies or counter-intelligence groups. Violence is not a life that one should choose unless it is thrust upon one, as Hildolfr once remarked to me. The same was most certainly true of servitude. But whatever a man’s circumstance, it was Weltyr’s will that he should make the best of it.

  And I must admit, taken aback as I was by the constant flow of exquisite women passing me while we made our way through the busy market crowds, I could easily see how what I intended to be a short period of servitude before some grand escape might be weighted to my benefit.

  For now, it was anything but enjoyable. In the heart of the market we went from stall to stall and the women pawned the wares I had carried from the raided temple one artisan at a time. Praise Weltyr, they stopped first at a textile merchant who, to my greatest relief, accepted the tapestry that had proved the most onerous of my burdens. Next came a goldsmith who worked out of one of the freestanding structures packed into the “pit” of El’ryh, as that lowest level of the elfin city was called. This slender wadjita, a snake-woman, turned the gold brazier over in her scaled claws. The yellow light of her eyes faded as they narrowed in assessment.

  “I’ll melt it down for forty percent,” she announced at last, yielding a noise of displeasure not just from the durrow but from me, who hauled the blasted thing all this way.

  “Forty percent!” Odile repeated the figure, visibly appalled, then demanded, “I could take this up to Sigur on Fourthlevel and he’d ask for nothing more than twenty.”

  “All while skimming off the top…ask him to melt down a candlestick and he’ll hardly yield enough gold for a ring. Forty percent,” repeated the snake-woman, setting the brazier down on the counter between us again. “And I can have it for you by tomorrow’s bloom.”

  Exchanging an annoyed look with Indra, Odile insisted, “Just because you haven’t any legs doesn’t mean you get to charge us ours.”

  “If you’re going to start hurling insults then I suppose I’ll take zero percent, because I won’t do it.”

  While Odile curled her lip at the wadjita, Indra piped up.

  “Maybe we could make a trade? Our slave here won’t be needing his sword any longer—”

  “Strife?” Appalled, I lay a protective hand upon the pommel of the blade. “You can no more take a paladin’s sword than you can take his manhood.”

  “We do that here too sometimes,” advised Odile. “But only in cases of extreme disobedience or violence against one’s mistress…anyway, Indra, he’s right. He’ll have to give up that sword at some point, but it could fetch much more than the reasonably charged smelting of this brazier. Although…”

  After tapping her pointed chin with a thoughtful look at me, Odile again addressed the proud wadjita. “Since he all but suggested it himself, what would you say to using our slave for a few hours instead of charging such exorbitant prices?”

  Though I balked a little, when I looked more closely at the snake-woman who was then p
eering back at me I had to admit she was quite lovely. Her sharp, shrewd features were accented by the glittering colors of her green and gold scales, and as far as exoticism went, one couldn’t get more exotic than a cold-blooded woman. Odile went on, “Indra and I can both attest to his value in these matters—can’t we, Indra?”

  “Oh yes,” agreed the durrow, able to stow away the bashfulness of the day prior when talking business with another woman, “his prowess is quite admirable.”

  Still assessing me with those reptilian eyes, the smith asked, “And what says the slave of this? Not all men are comfortable in a wadjita’s cold embrace.”

  There was something quite beautiful about her frigid features and the high, proud brow revealed by her swept-back black hair. Never having known a wadjita before, I have to admit I was rather intrigued. At last, spreading my free hand, I suggested, “So long as I am permitted by my mistresses to keep my sword, I would consider it no great sacrifice to have to lie with a sensual and lovely woman such as yourself.”

  With a laugh of surprise, the wadjita arched her thin brow at my mistresses. “He is a charmer, isn’t he? Well…perhaps twenty percent.”

  “Ten,” corrected Odile, seeing her inroad, “plus however long you like with the warrior-priest.”

  With an annoyed look and a drum of her slender fingertips upon the counter, the wadjita answered, “Fifteen,” and Odile rolled her eyes. At least, I thought she did…it was hard to tell with these women who lacked in pupils.

  “Twelve,” the firmer durrow tried one last time, yielding a scoff from the smith.

  “The only difference between ten and twelve is an insult. Fifteen and the pleasure of your man here when you come and pick up the gold, or you can take it up to Fourthlevel and pay twenty.”

  “Fine! Fine…I suppose it’s not unreasonable.” Still sighing, Odile yielded her handshake and pushed the brazier across the counter to the wadjita. “We’ll be back tomorrow to pick it up. You can have your time with the man then.”