No, she wants to talk to Rakkec beforehand

It was a relief to retreat from the audience chamber. Despite its wide floor and high, vaulted ceiling, it felt oppressive to Aliara. It wasn't just the looming presence of the Matron. That room brought back memories she had worked hard to bury. There had been a time, not too long ago, when the floor between the pillars had been full of sand, and two **** and terrified women had fought to the **** for the right to leave their humanity behind.

Teysa had broken the wheel, though. She had refused the Matron's poisoned gift. She had saved Aliara's life, and her own, too, and then she had turned their prison into a home. She had found something worthwhile in the midst of all the horror and misery and wrested it loose. That was her genius. She never stopped believing that better things were possible.

And how had that worked out for her? Aliara stumbled and turned her face to the wall. She felt, rather than heard, Lil'esh approaching her. It took a couple of deep, shaky breaths, but when she trusted her face not to betray her, Aliara turned around.

"Are you ok?" Lil'esh asked. She was standing close, and spoke so quietly that only Aliara could hear her. Behind her, the young drow were huddling together and having what sounded like an urgent, whispered conversation. Occasionally a pair of eyes would flicker towards Aliara and Lil'esh, but their owners apparently knew better than to interrupt.

"I'm fine." Aliara drew in a deep breath, held it a moment, let it out. "A lot of history in that room, that's all. Did you see the Matron's face?"

"I saw the skullcrusher she was holding." Lil'esh sounded a little shaken, but there was a new respect in her voice. "And you and Teysa confronted her alone and unarmed. That must have been terrifying."

"We didn't exactly have a choice. But yes, she can be scary when she wants to be. Apparently now she wants to be. Are they going to be ok?" Aliara nodded towards the drow.

Lil'esh shrugged. "They're impressed. Apparently speculating on what the driders are like was a bit of a craze among the nobility in the City. They were picturing something a bit more... glamorous, I think."

"Maybe we should show them the broodmothers. Take all the glamour out of it."

Both women considered this silently for a moment, and both came to the same conclusion.

"Better not," Lil'esh said. "It's not that I want to keep that a secret, it's just... we don't want to create a panic, do we?"

"Of course not," Aliara said, shaking her head. "Everything's a bit tense right now. They wouldn't understand."

"Later."

"Of course, later."

An uneasy silence descended on both of them. Aliara felt as though she were teetering on the edge of a cliff. Then the moment passed, and the feeling of danger faded. She coughed once, awkwardly.

"Yes. Well. I think you have a shopping list to share with Jez'ria."

"You're not coming?"

"I said I was going to fetch Rakkec, remember?"

Lil'esh made a face. "Him? Why get him involved? I don't think any of this is his business, do you?"

Aliara's jaw dropped. "His business? Lil'esh, they're his people too."

Lil'esh mumbled something Aliara couldn't hear. Her cheeks were flushing-- always a difficult thing to spot with drow, but Aliara had spent enough time around them by now to know the signs. Aliara told herself she really, really didn't want to know what the woman had said, but something made her ask: "Lil'esh, what was that?"

"I said they aren't." Lil'esh whipped her head up and stared at Aliara, defiance blazing in her eyes. Her voice was clipped and precise, every consonant hard-edged as a diamond. "They aren't his people. They're mine. His people are the ones that attacked us. And killed Thi'vo, don't forget."

"Lil'esh..." Aliara groped for words. "Lil'esh, he was brought here as a prisoner, too. You know that. How much of your anger is because of how he arrived, and how much is because of what he is?"

"It doesn't matter," Lil'esh sniffed. "I'm an adult. I can work with him. Just don't ask me to be his friend. Now, I have work to do, remember? Have fun." She turned on her heel and marched off. The young drow swept along in her wake, one or two of them casting looks back over their shoulders at Aliara.

Aliara watched them leave, then shook her head and turned in the opposite direction. She'd probably have to deal with Lil'esh's hangups later, but for now she had something important to ta.

She'd traversed this path a few times in recent weeks, calling on its one inhabitant. The tunnel grew narrower, its edges smoother, less like a natural formation and more like masonry. It sloped downwards, too, at first so gently that it was barely perceptible but gradually growing steeper until it felt like she was descending a spiral staircase.

After a few minutes, the corridor sharply leveled out and opened up into a wide-mouthed cavern. Stalactites bearded the arched roof, as though Aliara was walking into the fang-fringed maw of some buried monster. The light up ahead had a reddish quality and flickered magmatically.

It was all an effect, of course. This was what Rakkec had called the "minehead," but the driders had dug it out first, and like the rest of the warren it bore the unmistakable signs of their artistry. As Aliara entered the cave, she looked right, the way she always did. The sight was as impressive this time as it had been every time before. That wall had been planed smooth as though by a colossal razor. Embedded in its surface, lines of liquid fire twisted and spiraled. Veins of the earth, Rakkec had called them. The Veins formed no pattern Aliara could detect; they ran wildly, curving into and across each other, sometimes straightening out before spiraling madly away in a frenzy of loops and whorls. They shimmered bright orange, the color of molten rock, but without the heat-- they were as cool to the touch as the surrounding stone. They looked like narrow glass pipes filled with magma, but as Rakkec had explained to her, they were a natural phenomenon, a sort of gemstone that captured and conducted magical energy. "You get them in areas with thaumically reactive ores," he'd said. "Sort of a byproduct, I guess. They're ordinary quartz, but they form themselves into primitive ley channels."

"They must be valuable," she'd said, tracing the pattern with her fingers.

"Worthless. As soon as you extract them from the living stone, they collapse into quartz dust. They're dead useful, though. You never worry about light when you've hit the Veins. And they're as good as a sign: DIG HERE."

The potent geomancy of the driders had turned this antechamber into a display room for the Veins. Aliara had seen them enough times that the initial thrill had worn off, but now she lingered a moment, admiring their beauty. One thing that she never quite adjusted to was the unexpected beauty of the Underneath. It was all dingy caverns and lightless tunnels until, quite suddenly at times, it wasn't. She remembered the rainbow pool she'd showed Teysa during their captivity. Another bittersweet memory, but this one made her smile.

Veins of the Earth. She wondered who came up with the name. There was poetry, here in the Underneath. It was a shame that so few people ever got to see it.

"Rakkec?" she called. Her voice echoed off the walls. She could a noise up ahead, a rhythmic clink of metal on stone. Every so often it would be broken up by a rumbling thud, and occasionally a faint curse.

She found him where she'd known she would. Rakkec made his room in a tiny chamber just inside of the vestibule, barely large enough for his hammock and washbasin. Beyond the round door to his cave the minehead proper opened up, a wide-mouthed tunnel disappearing into darkness. Rakkec stood hunched over a stone slab built into one wall, jutting out at chest level. It was littered with stones about the size of his fist, each one different: one looked like black basalt, another the dull grey of slate, yet another mottled like granite. Rakkec was leaning over them with a small metal pick in his hand, tapping industriously at each stone and examining them close up. As Aliara watched, he chipped off a tiny fragment, licked his fingertips, and rubbed them against the stone. He was lifting his hand to his mouth when she coughed politely.

"Oh!" Rakkec dropped the pick with a clatter and whirled around. His eyes widened at the sight of her. "Aliara! What... what are you doing here?"

"I decided to take up mining. It's my new calling." She rolled her eyes. "Looking for you, dummy. Am I interrupting something important?"

"That?" He looked at his table of mismatched stones. "Oh, nah. Just feldspar. See, Jez'ria and I mapped out a few promising veins, so I had her sink a winze and grab a few samples for assay. It's mostly just pyrite and hematite, but there are promising hints of blackiron and--"

She cut him off quickly. Experience taught her that his capacity to ramble was infinite, or near enough to make no difference. "That sounds great, but we have to talk."

His face got suddenly solemn. "Oh. Ok. Did someone die?"

Aliara opened her mouth to say "no" and shut it again. That wouldn't exactly be accurate, would it? Instead she beckoned him over. "Not exactly," she said. "It's, well..."

She explained what she knew as best she could. Rakkec watched her in silence, his face betraying no emotion. At the end he nodded. "I see." He looked thoughtful.

"You..." Aliara searched for the most polite way to put it. "You knew Lord Lockh, didn't you? Do you think you have some insight into why he's doing all this?"

"Me?" Rakkec shook his head. "Lady, I'm sorry, I think you have the wrong idea. I was just following my buddy Korrio around." He frowned. "Least I thought I was. I guess I was wrong about that. Anyways, Lockh hated me. Kept threatening to have his bodyguard twist my head off." He shuddered. "He'd have done it, too. Nasty piece of work."

"Why didn't he do it, then?" Aliara asked. "From what I know about drow nobles, they don't tend to get squeamish. Especially when it comes to common folk. And slaves, she added internally.

"Korrio," Rakkec said at once. "He hated me, but he was scared to **** of Korr. Makes sense. I was, too." His expression clouded into one of terrible grief. "Poor Korr. I wish I knew what happened to him."

"I can tell you what happened to him," Aliara said. "He exploded. And he killed the woman I love, so spare me your moaning about him." She hadn't intended the snap so hard, and felt bad right away at Rakkec's hangdog look.

"No, milady," he said. "I mean, he didn't, milady. That wasn't him." It came out wuddn't, and he snorted through a nose that sounded thoroughly blocked. "My friend died before that. I dunno when, exactly, but that thing that scared Lockh and hurt your friend, that wasn't Korr."

"You've said." Aliara thought back to what she knew about possession. She remembered an abbey, somewhere on the surface-- a demon had taken over the Abbott, and he'd been murdering his brothers, one by one. Their band had stopped him then, but not before he'd flown around the nave of the chapel shooting green fire from his hands and speaking in tongues. Possession could mean anything.

"That's why we need your help," she added. "Whatever happened to your friend, whatever spirit or demon took him over, it's still out there. We don't know anything about it: what it wants, what it can do, where it comes from."

"Well, milady, I don't know any of that stuff. Korr, he didn't talk to me much, after... after it happened."

"You know more than we do, at least. And maybe there's something you know that you don't know you know. Some detail you don't realize is important."

"Why do you want to know all this, anyways?" Rakkec asked. "I never want to think about that month again for the rest of my life."

"Don't be such a coward!" Aliara scoffed. "It's still out there, like I said. And we think it's coming back. We need to be ready."

Rakkec stared at her in horror. "It's coming back? Why? Why haven't we run?"

"It came here for a reason, Rakkec," Aliara said. "It came to wipe us out for a reason. Just because it failed once doesn't mean it'll give up. And we can't run forever. The City has been taken! Are you suggesting that we just abandon those people?"

Gods, I sound like Teysa, she thought. The realization stunned her into silence.

Fortunately Rakkec didn't seem to notice; he was still making a horrified face. "Will I have to see him again?" he asked quietly. Sweat stood out on his forehead, despite the coolness of the minehead cavern.

"Don't you want ****?" Aliara asked. That would have worked on her, she knew it, but Rakkec just looked terrified. She sighed. "If you want to be safe again, we have to deal with this thing once and for all. And look at me. Don't you think I can keep you safe?" She drew a throwing knife from her belt and made it walk across her knuckles, then tossed it spinning in the air and caught it by the hilt without looking.

"Let me set something up with the Matron," Aliara asked. "Be ready. Try to remember every detail you can. Be brave." She gave his shoulder a little squeeze.

"That's the big drider, right?" Rakkec asked. "She scares me."

"Does anything not scare you?" Aliara replied, exasperated. Rakkec looked indignant.

"Plenty! But she's ten feet tall and half-spider. You're telling me she doesn't freak you out a little?"

"A little," Aliara admitted. "But I deal with it. So will you."

Rakkec nodded. He even managed a little smile. "I'll help, then," he said. "However I can."

"See you at the war council, then," she said, smiling back. Instantly, Rakkec's face went wooden.

"What's wrong?" Aliara asked. "You look like--"

"That's what _he _called it," Rakkec shuddered. There was no need to ask who he was. "The first time we met Lockh."