"Tell me about Lord Lockh."

“Lord Lockh,” Teysa said. “You served him, didn’t you?” She did her level best not to sound accusatory, but it was impossible to keep all the bitterness out of her voice.

Rakkec paled, at least insofar as the drow were capable of it. “Served him?” he echoed. “Wouldn’t say that. I followed him, aye. Followed him the same as a pet warg follows the orc holding the **** chain.” His eyes grew distant. “Korr was my friend. But I didn’t serve him, either.”

“Korr?” Teysa asked. She thought back to her conversations with Aliara. Had she mentioned another drow?

“Korrio. He was… he fought with you, up in the air. During the battle.”

Teysa stiffened. The creature she’d killed, the drow with the darkness under his skin. And the way this Rakkec spoke of him, fondly…

“He was your friend?”

“He was, once,” Rakkec said. He looked down and sniffed. He seemed folded up in his own misery. “I know you killed him. I don’t blame you. The thing you killed, it weren’t him, not really. I keep telling people, and I don’t know if they understand.”

“I don’t think I understand,” Teysa said. “You’re a miner, right?”

Rakkec nodded and blew his nose. “Freelance. Me and Korr. We’d pick up the leavings, the—”

“What I mean is, what were a couple of miners doing attacking a drow warren with an army?”

“That was Lockh’s army,” Rakkec said. “It was Korrio set all that up. Or, you know, that thing what looked like Korrio. At that point I was just following along. I was scared, you know? I thought one of the two of them would kill me, but I knew they’d kill me if I tried to leave, so I just followed along and stayed quiet and hoped they’d forget about me.”

“Why don’t you tell me everything?” Teysa said. “From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out. Assume I don’t know anything at all.”

Rakkec looked up at her, and the expression on his face gave her pause. His eyes were deep, sunken pits, shining with tears. His mouth was twisted by grief and guilt. He took a deep, unsteady breath and lifted one hand off his knee. His fingers were shaking badly.

“Korr and I was out digging. We had a pass, a free survey of a deep shaft. Real deep, below the Anvilsson Limit. We were looking for rubikite, blackiron, even—”

One look at her expression and he swallowed hard. “Anyways, we were down there in these tunnels, right, and we found this quartz lode. Amazing, biggest you’ve ever seen. Was like a single gigantic stone the size of a carriage. And hollow. It was like an eggshell, made of stone and quartz. We broke it open right away.

Teysa couldn’t shake the mental image: a massive egg, all of stone, its surface shining with seams of gems and precious metals. Something about the idea made her uneasy, though she could not say what.

“Inside it was a little cave. Dark. Real dark, and trust me, ma’am, I know dark. Sometimes, under the City, you get dark like that. Drinks the light right up. Jealous dark, we call it, what don’t want any light to interfere. Korr went in there first, and he came out… different.”

“Different?” Teysa realized she’d been hanging onto his every word. Rakkec was an indifferent storyteller at best, but the image of the golden egg full of darkness had lodged in her brain.

“It was his shadow, ma’am,” Rakkec said. “It was like his shadow crawled inside him and took him over. It was in his eyes and his mouth and all around him, like smoke. At first he could hide it a bit, and he played it off to me like he just got a little knocked around, but pretty soon he saw I wasn’t going to be a threat. So he stopped even pretending. It wasn’t Korr no more, even though he said he was. He started talking at night, when he thought I was asleep. Or maybe he knew I could hear him and he just didn’t care.”

“Talking? To who?”

“Nobody, s’far as I can tell. Just talking to himself. Muttering, like. I didn’t catch most of it, and some of what I did was in some other language, but I didn’t like the sound of it. He was planning. He was talking about some woman a lot. He never said who, but he sounded like he hated her. We was living in an inn at this point, and he was all holed up in our room, reading these books and scrolls. I never saw where he got them. Maybe he wrote them hisself, but I doubt it. Korr wasn’t much of a writer.”

“And what did you do?” Teysa asked. She tried to picture it: the two drow miners, one terrified, the other in the grip of something he couldn’t understand.

“I got us food and water. Korr gave me money, and never you mind where it came from. I guess I should have run away, but I kept thinking: maybe I can get him a doctor. Or a priestess. Maybe I can help him.” He stared at the ground, dejected. “He was my friend, you know? My only friend. Old Korr. And maybe he coulda been nicer to me, but he didn’t deserve… that. That thing just burrowed into him and mined him right out. Left him hollow.”

He sighed.

“Anyways, after a week o’ this, I was getting ready to tell him I needed him to go see a priestess, and he surprises me. Says we’re going to go out into the City, and to pack up my things. I was worried, cause at this point he looked like he’d been dead and rotting a week. But never you mind, Rakkec, just grab your shit and follow me, and I did. That’s how we ended up at Lord Lockh’s manor. The guards tried to stop us, but Korr just looked at them and they…”

He shuddered, staring at nothing, and again Teysa felt a pang of pity for him. He’d clearly seen things no drow should see.

“He killed ‘em,” he said quietly, and left it at that. “He killed ‘em, and when Lockh got home Korr talked to him for a while. They left me in the other room, so I don’t know what they talked about, but I bet you can guess. Then that was that, we were honored guests of Lord Lockh, and a day or two later we were marching. And that’s how I ended up here.”

He lapsed into silence. The cave was still and quiet but for the faint drip of water on stone.

Teysa wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Contrition? Regret? Rakkec had plenty of both of those, but from her perspective, he was as much a victim as she was. Perhaps moreso. No wonder he’d stuck around. Where else could he go?

She wasn’t sure what to say to him. Something reassuring seemed to be in order, but all the words she could think of tasted like ashes on her tongue. “It’s not your fault, Rakkec,” she began. It seemed safe enough.

“I know it ain’t!” he said, looking suddenly up at her. “You don’t hafta talk to me like a child. Yes, I know it ain’t my fault. That’s not what’s eating at me. It’s just…” he sighed. “It’s all so random, y’know? It coulda been me walking in front in that mineshaft, and then I’d have fallen through the wall. Or maybe if we were five minutes late to the auction, we woulda bid on a different salvage, and we wouldn’t have been in there in the first place. Or maybe if we’d just dug the blackiron veins we found we’d have never seen the quartz deposit at all.”

“You can’t—” Teysa began, and shut herself up. She had been about to tell Rakkec he couldn’t think like that, but of course he could. It was the most natural thing in the world. How many times had she had the same thought? If her group had taken a different route through the Underneath… if they’d chosen to bodyguard that dwarven noble instead of strike out on their own… if they’d never run afoul of the Matron in the first place, what would have become of them? Would Teysa still be walking around under the sun, on two human legs? Would Rodrik and Mez still be alive? (Were they still alive? She assumed not, but she’d never asked the Matron, partially out of fear of what she might say).

On the other hand… Aliara would still just be a friend and adventuring companion. Teysa would be wandering aimlessly, trying to solve the world’s problems one mace-swing at a time. Trying to empty the oceans with a teacup.

And the driders would still be **** travelers, breeding them against their will, hanging them from the walls and letting them rot in the darkness. The drow would still be a society of slavers under the thumb of a mad Empress.

“It doesn’t do any good to think of what might have been,” she said instead. “You don’t know how this story ends.”

“S’pose not,” Rakkec said. “I’m just a simple man, ma’am. I don’t pretend I know all the answers. I just miss my friend, is all.”

“Me too,” Teysa said softly. She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud until Rakkec looked quizzically up at her.

“Anyways!” she went on before he could frame the question she saw on his face. “I need your help, Rakkec. We all do.”

He shrugged. “Like I told Aliara, I’ll do what I can. Not sure how much that is.”

“I believe it’s more than you think,” Teysa said. “From what you tell me, Lockh isn’t really our enemy, any more than your friend was. Something has taken control of him. Whatever was in the… the quartz egg.” Again, something about that image disturbed her, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. She shook her head to clear it.

Rakkec nodded. “But I don’t know nothing about it. Korr, he didn’t talk to me much after he changed. And Lockh never talked to me at all. Looked at me like I was muck on the bottom of his boot. He woulda killed me, if he wasn’t so scared of Korr.”

Teysa waved that away. “There’s got to be something,” she said. “Something we can use. Think hard. After you came back to the City, did you notice anything about Korrio? The way he was behaving or acting? Something that stood at out as unusual?”

“Besides looking like a zombie, reading at all hours, leaking smoke, and talking to hisself?” Rakkec looked at Teysa in disbelief. “Ma’am, he was one hundred percent unusual.”

“Think!” Teysa said, surprising herself with her own urgency. She was on the cusp of something important, she knew it. “There’s got to be something!”

“I’m so-o-orry!” Rakkec said. His voice was oddly modulated, and Teysa blinked in surprise. Somehow, without her conscious intervention, her hands had reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders, and she was shaking him back and forth.

She snatched her hands back as though scalded. “I’m sorry!” she cried. “Mother Below! I don’t know what got into me!”

And I don’t know why I just said that, either, she thought. Up until recently, she would have said something like “by Agamor’s light!”

“S’ok,” Rakkec said, massaging his shoulders. “We’re all a bit tense right now. But I’ll think about it, alright? I promise. If I think of anything useful, I’ll let you know right away.”

“Thank you,” Teysa said. There was more she wanted to ask him, much more, but it could wait. Right now, Rakkec looked even more rattled than Teysa felt. They were all under plenty of stress, as he said, but there was no sense taking it out on him.

Besides, she had places to be.