She laughed. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day?”
Julen looked around, then beckoned her closer. Zaltys obligingly leaned in. “I was belly-down on the roof of your mother’s wagon, my ear right next to the chimney, eavesdropping,” he said.
Zaltys widened her eyes. “You were spying on my mother?”
Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do. We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”
“Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”
“Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”
Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that. They were talking about Rainer?”
“They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he was imprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”
Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”
“Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”
Glory, Zaltys thought.
“Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”
She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”
Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers-it was the same day they found you.”
“You’re sure?”
“That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”
“I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.
“Ah. They … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.
Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said. He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him.”
Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”
“People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”
“But why? Why tell me my family was dead?”
“Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”
“Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of course, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really considered that they might be real. “If he … wait … did Rainer see my family down there?”
“He didn’t say. And your mother didn’t ask, at least, not that I heard. Rainer said there were other human slaves, though, along with snake people, bullywugs, kuo-toa, and creatures he couldn’t identify. The slaves labored in mushroom fields, harvesting food, and were used as live bait to catch horrible blind fish the derro like to eat, and sent in to do war against the enemies of the derro, which are, I gather, everyone in the world. Rainer says the creatures are mad, and coming from someone as broken up as he is, that’s saying something. He said he saw horrible things in the service of the derro.” Julen shook his head. “They fought the servants of gods whose names have been forgotten by the surface world. Living pools of blood. Creatures with wings like razors. Beholders. Purple worms, and once, a purple dragon. He finally saw a chance to escape in a recent battle, hid in the tunnels, and started following a snake because he had no other idea where to go. The snake led him to fresh air, and a crack in the rock, and once he reached the surface, he wandered until he found some river that leads to a waterfall-”
“Shattered Rainbow Falls,” Zaltys murmured. “It’s a day’s walk, but it’s beautiful there.”
“Yes. From there, he knew the way to the caravan site, and that’s how he found us.”
Zaltys stood, swaying a little from the hard wind of the revelations Julen had brought. “But if Rainer survived all these years, then my family might still be alive down there. In the dark. In thrall to monsters. If that’s true, family is the most important thing. It’s the one thing in this world I know to be true, family is everything.” She shook her head. “But he’s probably just crazy. I’m sure his mind is a mess, he must be misremembering, it was nearly twenty years ago, after all. What if he’s just mad? Mistaken?”
“It’s possible,” Julen conceded. “But he sounded sane enough, once he calmed down, and one thing followed another in his story pretty clearly. We’ll probably never know.”
“No. I have to know. I need the truth,” she said.
Julen spread his hands. “How? If your mother and the others were lying to you, how can you trust anything they say if you confront them?”
She nodded. “You’re right. I can’t just ask. So I have to go look. I have to go find out if my original family is dead.”
“How do we do that? Investigate a crime almost two decades old?”
“It’s easy,” Zaltys said. “We do it with shovels.”
Chapter Eight
Julen leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow. Zaltys had waited until nightfall to sneak away and investigate, which had given Julen ample time to convince her to bring him along. “I wish someone had given you a magical earth-moving pickaxe for your initiation.”
“At least the shadow armor doesn’t get dirty,” Zaltys replied, driving the shovel down again. She stood in a hole so deep that only her shoulders and head were aboveground, and she was beginning to think she’d never find the thing she both hoped and dreaded to discover.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Julen looked around at the canted walls, the shattered stone, and the fragments of unsettling carvings.
“I asked, long ago, where my family and the rest of the village was buried. Krailash brought me to this place, and said Quelamia had covered over their grave with earth and stone by magic. They picked this ruined structure because it was so recognizable, and would be easy to find, if I ever wanted to see it. I come every year. I leave flowers. And now? I’m beginning to think there aren’t any bodies buried under here at all. And if there are no bodies …”