Forgotten Realms Fan Fiction ❯ The Cat and the Spider ❯ Slave-Girl of the Drow ( Chapter 3 )

THE CAT AND THE SPIDER

 

 

Disclaimer: I own nothing except Shan Mao.

 

Notes: The notion of the extra-dimensional exiled person is an old staple of mine. As I said before, I am an experimented Game Master in the role-playing community. The idea of a normal person sent into another fantasy world came from my considerable collection of Japanese Anime.

 

I do not think that Shan Mao will encounter the Big Guns of the Forgotten Realms or perhaps only as guest stars. Elminster and either of the Seven Sisters will be enchanted to help Shan Mao but I want to create a character that will deal exclusively with the Underdark. Drizzt would perfectly understand the need for this girl to do something against the insanity of Lolth.

 

For those who know about Sheoloth, you'll find that this version is rather…tamed in comparison to the original. My version is a blend of the original Sheoloth and everything written about the Drows in the Forgotten Realms and let's not forget the fantastic “Drow's Tales”.

 

Warning: Mature themes.

 

 

Chap 3: Slave-Girl of the Drow.

 

 

Shan Mao didn't think she could feel more mortified and embarrassed as she was being exposed on the auction block, manacled and…completely naked to a whole crowd.

 

A pale light shed by some magical stone torches gave an eerily aspect to everything as the silver-haired girl looked warily around her. The slaves were presented one by one on the raised platform and she really didn't like the expectation and enthusiasm of some of the buyers when they looked at the `merchandise'. The fact that they were not only non-humans but a race of black-skinned Elves did very little to her already plummeting moral.

 

The Elves were speaking in a curious tongue, with an almost musical quality. It was strange to sense such a…fairy feature in a race that was…proudly displaying its cruelty. The acts before their auction and all the atrocities she witnessed since her capture didn't reassure her about her fate, rather the contrary. Survival for her would need both wits and luck…and she still would have to pay a heavy price for it.

 

The Chinese albino girl could already distinguish that she was in a caste-style culture as well as a matriarchal society. The Dark Elves were separated into those `In Power' and those `Without'. It was plainly visible in their clothes and their attitudes.

 

Due to the `Dark Ages' flavour on the underground city, she could only called some few `Nobles' and the majority of the rest `Commoners' although `Merchants' was another quite possible title for some.

 

But one thing she could really see was the raw power and arrogant authority of all the females present. In general, they were taller than the males and the latter let quite a large zone around the females sometimes instinctively.

 

Neshad Luzkar laughed silently in a corner of the market. He had been right: The mark of Lolth had disappeared from the neck of his new capture. He hadn't charged an extravagant price for her because he knew that should she survive, her simple existence would fetch a higher price in the future. The mark, in form of the two red triangles of a black widow, would only appear if the Goddess of Chaos still wanted to torment the young girl. He nodded to himself: He will assign someone to survey her.

 

On the stage, it was the turn of Shan Mao to be `presented' as`merchandise' for the `buyers'. The slave trader gesturing near her was talking like a car's salesman with a brand new `second hand' acquisition. She supposed that her `exotic look' would fetch a nice price for this jaded crowd.

 

She didn't know why, but once again, she was almost sure that his gestures were a language in themselves. Probably because a few Dark Elves in the crowd were signing like him.

 

She tensed, flinched and winced when the slaver began to expose her to the scrutiny of the buyers like an object, a property, a non-person.

 

Tears formed in her eyes as he palmed her skin, probably showing the smoothness of her young skin, manhandling her by her luxuriant mane of hair and roughly exposing her teeth to show their wholeness.

 

She was trembling when he finally finished, but didn't know if it was in fright, pure humiliation, impotent anger or a blend of all those.

 

Curiously, her appearance wasn't something that appealed the Dark Elves. She still couldn't discern the exact social class of the Elves, but the fellow that buy her seemed to be a merchant or middle-class.

 

She wasn't the only acquisition of this particular Dark Elf. If she was any judge, she guessed that he had bought his selection for their physical aptitudes for dexterous manual work. Most of the slaves were humans like her and featured nimble fingers or a soft or comely appearance.

 

She gulped as another `profession' could be the reason of this choice: Prostitution.

 

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Well, it hadn't been for prostitution. When the little troop of slaves had gained the building of the merchant, she had released a breath she didn't remark she was holding. Apparently, it was a manufacture, a silk manufacture. Only the origin of the silk was different: Giant spiders.

 

In fact, Shan Mao had remarked that the spider motif was present absolutely everywhere. Such ubiquity meant only one thing: Religion. Those Dark Elves prayed to a spider-type divinity, and it was not good.

 

It wasn't that a spider was a disgusting beast: It was because it was a predator, and a deadly one.

 

She knew, for having learnt it at school, that some spiders were able to capture preys much bigger than them. And she wasn't taking into account their poison and web capacities or how they ate.

 

After having seen and felt the cruelty of those people, she had no doubt that their major deity wasn't a gentle one.

 

One good thing was the smattering of English blend with some other terms that their “Master” was using to explain a few things…and demonstrate others. That enabled Shan Mao to understand the expectations in her new life.

 

Marg was his name, and we were his new silk harvesters and silk throwers. There was only one word: `Obey'. Or more exactly three words since it were more: `Obey or die'.

 

Once he was done with his `motivation' speak, he let another slave to talk to us about the specific of our tasks.

 

He was a human male of undetermined age as the ordeals of his existence among the Dark Elves had ravaged his features. He was brutal and hit violently one of our numbers to impose silence. He presented himself as the `Slave Overseer' among the slaves and his task was to ensure we did a good work up to the standard of their masters.

 

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After a week into her slavery, Shan Mao had begun to adapt. At least, she was accepting her situation while still wanting desperately to go home or more simply, escaping this hellhole.

 

She had rapidly understood that there was a caste system even within the Slave community, if such a word was usable in this world. There were the Disposable Slaves, the Valued Slaves and the Flesh-crafted Insects.

 

The Disposables Slaves were those who served for dangerous works where the life expectancy was short and death, if brutal, was almost welcomed. They hauled rocks from mine collapses, hauled waste from the vast cisterns beneath the rich houses, fed dangerous beasts, or worse, were used for experimentation by various Dark Elves. Whatever they did, they were exposed to danger all day everyday and had only three hours of rest per day. They were ill-fed and abused by their masters, and the dead served as material for the horrible corpselights that lit the city.

 

Shan was among the Valued Slaves. That was those who had a skill or feature usable for producing some works for the Dark Elves. They could be laboratory assistants, smiths, scribes or entertainers.

 

The last category was the Flesh-crafted Insects. It was curious to think of them as slaves as they were, she hoped for most, non sentient. Shan encountered them when a female Dark Elf came into the shop with a giant centipede to carry what she bought. It was a freakish mutant that was almost emanating a sickly aura of chaos and insanity. Traumatized by the encounter, she nonetheless listened to her Overseer talking about the Flesh-crafter's Guild that used dark sorcery and alchemical poisons to transmogrifying living insect into purpose-built living tools. She shivered in terror as she heard the man saying that the rumour was that disobedient slaves were often punished by being sold to the Guild and metamorphosed into insect-like humanoids.

 

The work day of Shan Mao began by being roused from sleep within the slave dormitory. All the new slaves, regardless of sex, were sleeping in the same dormitory which was monitored by the Slave Overseer. For now, they hadn't be any incident within the dormitory regarding violence.

 

They then took a copious but bland meal made mainly of mushrooms and lichens that was prepared by the cook staff. The Overseer delivered then the assigned tasks of the day. It was the first exposition for Shan to the nutritious imports in the underground realm. She discovered many things. `Sporebread' was bread made with the flour of grounded spores from `Bluecap Fungus'. `Ripplebark' was a shelf like fungus that resembled nothing so much as a mass of rotting flesh and was surprisingly edible and tasted rather good when prepared. The spores of the `Zurkhwood' were also served prepared. Those spores were simply the by-product of the exploitation of this giant mushroom that served as a source of timber. Many items were crafted from Zurkhwood instead of wood. The various sources of proteins came from bats, fishes, lizards, insects such as beetles and crickets and a curious creature looking like a bison known as `Rothé'. Shan Mao had quickly discovered that some races were living underground and that some people clearly came from the surface as they weren't used to the different food.

 

The work day consisted mainly of menial tasks, such as fetching a tool for an experienced slave or giving food to the silk-producing spiders. Those creatures were held in a specific cage that prevent any movement and let accessible their silk glands and the head. Feeding them consisted to push a living animal, such as a rothé, to its mandibles and let it suck it dry. To her horror, one time, it had been the corpse of a freshly killed Drow that she was forced to feed to the arachnids.

 

Sometimes, Shan was taken apart by a dark elf and showed how to extract the silk from the glands by stimulating them with a gentle finger and promptly gathered the sticky thread on small wheels. Shan Mao had some difficulty with `Undercommon', the mangled version of English the dark elf used, but she had curiously less difficulty than with `Common', the surface version used by much of the slaves. A work day was ten to twelve hours of works depending of the demand on silk. After that, they received six to eight hours of sleep.

 

The harvesting of silk was much easier than the throwing of it. It required steaming the cone of silk then stretching the loosened strands on a complex threading machine that twisted the very delicate strands into solid threads. The process is repeated until the required thread is enough for cords, sheets and so on.

 

Here and there, Shan and her fellow slaves managed to snatch a few hours of unsupervised time. Most spent the time playing simple card games or idly chatting about the events of their daily lives. Those few times were a gold mine of information for Shan Mao as she had great difficulty to integrate herself among the slaves. Her exotic aspect as an albino and her foreign attitudes were casting her as an outsider. Worse, her red eyes were too much like the eyes of their captors.

 

Nonetheless, she learnt that she was in a vast underground realm known as `The Underdark' and where many races, most of them evil, dwelt and plot. The Dark Elves were known as `The Drow' and were the worst of all the evil races in the Underdark. This planet was known as `Faerun' and one man, identified as a priest of the surface, referred to this universe as `The Forgotten Realms'. But forgotten by whom and why?

 

Under the bite of the whip from the Slave Overseer, Shan Mao leant rapidly the three main rules of the slaves: A slave must not speak to a Drow unless first spoken to. A slave must obey the orders given by any Drow or Overseer, provided those orders did not conflict with any standing orders given by the owner. And, finally, a slave must immediately attempt to follow any orders given by its master.

 

She had also noticed that only rather old slaves, most likely those who had proven their loyalty and dependability, were given more freedom and could travel through Sheoloth.

 

That was the final piece of knowledge she exhumed from her environment. This underground city was known as Sheoloth. It was built around the shaft of an old volcano and was a former surface elves' city. The Drow had conquered it in the past and they reigned supreme on all their neighbours. The nearest surface realm was the `Great Rift' home to the Deep Realm of the Gold Dwarves. The city was also near the underground vast body of water known as the `Glimmering Sea'.

 

The founder was an Archmage named Karzai and was a sort of Honoured Ancestor among the Drow. Most of the building materials were made of native stone, but the Drow also used Construction Silk from giant spiders and resin produced by flesh-crafted insects. Shan Mao had seen the first part of production of those materials and it was the equivalent of her world hard plastics. One thing, she could say about the city, was its rather primitive sewer system. Waste was gathered by sector and sent down `the Falling Road', the main shaft that led to a constantly active magma pocket. There were also flesh-crafted insects that lives on and recycled the waste.

 

The principal sources of light were the corpselights, a magic named `Fairy Fire' made permanent and a variety of glow moss.

 

The complex of warehouse, production building and shop that was the property of Marg was located in one of the twenty-five wards of the city.

 

The ward was named `Granite Circle', for the ring shape of its cavern and the sloping rows of houses climbing in neat arcs on the eastern side of the ward. When she was brought in the ward, Shan Mao saw that it was crowded and haphazardly constructed. It was a real labyrinth, and the locals were not terribly ready to lend a helping hand. She also deduced that the ward circled around the volcano upper shaft that was the back bone of the city.

 

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The next week was not so good overall. The slaves had settled down and took their marks in the new environment. It was time for various fights about power among the slaves and pecking order.

 

Once again, her foreign origin had hindered her and she was near the bottom. At least, that was what a big fellow tried to point to her when he stole a big part of her foreign meal.

 

Shan Mao had reacted badly at that. Already feeling on the verge of breakdown in this strange universe without any familiar point of reference, she lashed out as her fear, anxiety and anger mixed and exploded.

 

It took several people to stop her. Shan Mao found herself emerging from a berserker-like trance. She blinked as she felt held by at least four persons on the dry ground. She had a sore throat and was bewildered to understand that it was because she had screamed at the top of her lungs until now.

 

In front of her, the one she knew as a priest was using his power to heal…

 

She gasped. The person treated was the bully that stole her meal. He was bloodied and seemed to have made fifteen rounds with Bruce Lee. With a sinking sensation, she realized that the various bruises on her were the result of her relentless and merciless beating on the man with her martial skills.

 

She found herself more isolated after that. The slaves were now purposely avoiding her and casting her out from the meagre net of information she had till this incident. She quietly and silently sobbed under the rags of her couch during the `night'.

 

Despite numerous tries, she was rebuked by her fellow slaves. She understood why, and she couldn't denied that she had an episode of insanity due to the conditions she was living in, but she felt abandoned and her heart began to withdraw and built protective shield. Was she condemned to be alone in her quest for home?

 

Unfortunately, her little altercation had been witnessed by the Slave Overseer, and the jaded and ruthless human had smiled when he thought of how he could exploit her on this particular incident.

 

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Neshad Luzkar laughed silently as he received the last report from the spy she put to his recent discovery. Apparently, the young girl had more bite than she had revealed when he captured her. He saw the particular magic of the Mark of Lolth at work in that fact.

 

So the young albino girl was capable to fight, huh? Well, he had to arrange for a way to test it…properly.

 

He thought about it and suddenly his red eyes widened in realisation and secret joy. This time, his laugh was audible and froze the blood of his bodyguards outside his office. It was never a good thing to have a Luzkar laughing about something…or someone.

 

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Shan Mao kept her eyes down although her awareness was trying to keep track of everything around her. Since the incident with a fellow slave, she had been granted minor leeway with her Master and the Slave Overseer.

 

Well, leeway in the form of being a beast of burden when the oldest and loyal slaves of Marg, the silk merchant, needed to buy things for them or their master.

 

She didn't regret being outside, she regretted the way it had happened. Trading the occasion to see the outside for her status among the slaves left the bitterness of ash in her mouth.

 

As she had seen before, the whole city was built around the Falling Road, a volcano shaft. There were two main ways of access. In the lower part of the Road, the water ways were exploited at the level of the ward `Ebon Dock'. The upper exits were closed by the `Night Seal' and the `Sun Gate'.

 

All in all, Sheoloth would have been a nice and beautiful city, if it wasn't the showcase of the cruelty of the Drow race.

 

Seeing all this, Shan Mao felt the sting of despair as she realised that escaping this hell would require careful and long term planning, and also a great deal of luck. One thing was sure, she needed to obtain a status among the Drow, and not as a slave or practice target, or worse, guinea pig.

 

She felt mortified as she realised that in such a world, where life was cheap, she would need to shed blood… A lot of blood, and she feared not restricted to Drow blood.

 

She was a young girl, lost in an unknown world and her greatest achievement, her skill in Martial Arts was about to be stained if she wanted to survive and perhaps go home.

 

She didn't take formally it, but there was an unspoken oath within the Martial Arts Community: Protect the weak. Martial Arts were for Defence, never for Attack.

 

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The next week, when she followed her Master and the Slave Overseer on the Falling Road, Shan Mao felt a sick feeling in her stomach. Sweat was shinning on her forehead and she was forcing herself to not wriggle her hands in anxiety. Everything in her guts was screaming for danger.

 

And yet, she couldn't do anything. Not if she wanted to stay alive and able to look around her to construct a proper mental map of the city to help in her escape.

 

Her master was preparing something with her as a participant, willingly or not. The day before, she had been examined again by her master. Even now, the memory of his moist hands on her skin as he looked everywhere, without any consideration for her, was making her tremble in disgust and loathing.

 

She was aware that the Drow didn't have the particular taboo of her society. The Dark Elves were proud of the beauty of their bodies and showed it without shame. Even some armour was designed to reveal a maximum of skin while still protecting it.

 

The little group reached nearly the bottom of the main shaft and entered the ward known as `the Shrieking Hive'. And Shan Mao promptly understood why it was named so.

 

There were low ambient, but nonetheless perceptible sounds that were emanating from behind the collectively closed doors of the old and half-collapsed buildings: The raw savage screams that could only come from the throat of victims as well as predators.

 

The advantage of Shan Mao due to her genetic quirk was working against her as her senses, mundane and Chi-based, perceived the mad circle of life and death chasing its tail into a deadly spiral.

 

Bodies were piling in stinking heaps at the ends of passages and she instinctively drew nearer her two captors. Despite their cruelty and the potential danger, it was surely preferable to whatever caused…'that' in this ward.

 

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The Haedistika was a collection of businesses located in the centre of the ward. They operated normally most of the day, but for four hours.

 

During those four hours, the shops became central points of sale on violence in all its forms. Be it sex, torture, fight or insane slaughter, it could be bought here. And Shan Mao found herself in the heart of it.

 

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Notes: It's been a while, but a review inspired me enough to rekindle my old creative flame. I just hope it won't extinguish for a few more chapters.