Underkeeper

Bernt woke to a quiet whimpering noise. It was mostly dark, with just a bit of light coming in through one of the open windows. He blinked and rubbed at his eyes, trying to get his bearings.

He was in his new home in the Undercity. The low light was filtering in through the windows from the tunnel’s luminescent flora.

The sound came again, and Bernt quickly cast a torch spell to give him some light. It didn't feel quite right, but it worked. Jori was curled up on her bed – Bernt had managed to shape a rough stone bench with a slight depression in the middle for her, and she’d loaded her bedding material into it last night. She wasn’t sleeping easily. Her wings twitched and she hissed, batting at the air with one clawed hand. Then she flinched and whimpered again.

“Jori?” Bernt got up and reached over to nudge her shoulder. Her eyes popped wide open and she flinched back, looking wildly all around.

“Agh! Wha–?” Her eyes locked on Bernt and she sagged with relief.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asked curiously. Jori didn’t usually have nightmares. For that matter, she didn’t sleep very much. Most days, she was out hunting before he even woke up. “Was it the fight yesterday?”

The little imp had suffered horrific burns and other injuries. Sure, they’d healed almost instantly, but he couldn’t imagine that kind of regeneration came without any kind of cost.

Jori shook her head.

“No, it was the other place. We were being hunted. It was the fiends..." She was breathing a little too fast, and her eyes darted around the room. "They always went after the spawnlings, because we were the smallest. They would stalk our entire pack and pick us off, one by one.”

Jori stopped, staring at nothing for a second. “When I was spawned there were hundreds of us. Now… I don’t know. When I was pulled over here it was maybe fifty.” She looked up at him, seeming… smaller, somehow, than normal. “Do you think I’m the only one left?”

Bernt blinked. Jori had never really talked about the hells at all, much less mentioned anything like friends or family. He had no idea that imps lived in herds or packs. He wasn’t even sure that the warlocks knew. Demons didn’t have a sense of community or collective – it was one of the first and only things he’d ever been taught about them back at the Academy. He wanted to ask more about it, but this didn't seem like the time for it. Maybe he could ask Josie.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re safe now, and you’re not small or weak anymore. I don’t think anyone can just casually hunt you like they did when you were a spawnling.”

Jori looked up at Bernt, her face firming. “I’m going to find them, someday. I will.”

Bernt nodded to her encouragingly. “Okay, good. Are you alright?” He held out a bit of spicy rat jerky to her. She grabbed it and nodded.

“Yes. I'm alright. Let’s go to work.”

Only as Bernt got dressed did he realize what it meant that his spell had worked almost normally. His hand felt a little odd – sort of a low, electric tingle in his palm, but nothing like the day before. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief – it wasn’t perfect, but he was recovering from the injury he’d suffered the day before. He’d have to try a harder spell later.

–--------

When they stepped out into the street, Bernt found the place transformed. He’d noticed that more of the homes were occupied when they came home last night – there had been lights on in many of the gaping windows, and more traffic down in the market area. Now, in the morning, the street outside was alive with people going about their business.

Hammering echoed from across the street, where a dwarven carpenter was using a plumb line to adjust the same door frame that he’d watched his new goblin neighbors try to install by themselves two days before. As he watched, the green-skinned woman leaned out of the unshuttered window to hand the dwarf a cup of something hot to drink.

In fact, the dwarf was looking quite popular in the new neighborhood. Another goblin was talking to him as he worked, and a few others stood nearby along with an uncomfortable-looking gnome.

Bernt was a little surprised to see a gnome here, but he supposed he shouldn’t have been. Looking around at the trickle of traffic moving briskly along the street in front of his home, he realized that the neighborhood really wasn’t quite as homogeneously goblin-centric as he’d thought. There were a handful of other gnomes walking around, some heavily tattooed humans who Bernt assumed might be adherents of some kind of shamanistic practice, and a weather-beaten dwarf who was either working here or who wanted to defy expectations by moving into the goblin quarter. He even saw a gnoll pulling along a cart full of boxes, probably about to move in somewhere down the way.

And all of them still needed doors. Who would have thought that a new underground district full of stone dwellings would be so good for the city’s carpenters?

Bernt hoped that his own carpenter would get around to fitting his doors and windows soon. He’d had to pay in advance, and the prices were quite a bit higher than he’d been expecting. He was almost completely out of coin for the first time in years. His next pay day was over a week away, but the castellan still owed him a few silver marks for his twice-weekly teaching gig at the orphanage.

It would be enough. Probably. There was no sense in worrying about it now.

“Hey there, neighbors!” a voice called from behind him. Bernt turned to find a goblin in a gray guard uniform approaching him. He was thin and tall for a goblin, nearly reaching to Bernt’s shoulder.

“Uh, hi,” Bernt said in reply. He'd seen him before, but couldn't quite remember his name. “Are you heading in to work?”

“Yup!” the goblin said cheerfully and started walking alongside them. “I’m relieving my dad over in the Underworks. He was on night patrol."

"My name’s Nirlig.” He added a second later with a little wink, correctly interpreting Bernt's squinty greeting. He looked down at Jori and pressed his hands together in some kind of greeting or salute. “You’re the demon that got into that crazy firefight with the duergar warlock yesterday, right? Dhzori?”

He pronounced it slightly differently, overemphasizing the first consonant.

“Uh… Yes? What are the ‘Underworks’?” Jori asked, echoing Bernt’s own thoughts.

The goblin beamed at her as if he'd been hoping she would ask exactly that.

“It’s what the dwarves are calling their new little crafting quarter! Many of the dwarven crafters are moving in, even coming directly from the crafter’s district. They just like it better underground, I guess. Dwarves, you know? I hope we can get a troll or two to move here now. They’re not very sociable, but their shamans can do some incredible things with stone.”

Bernt hummed skeptically. “I don’t think any trolls are going to move into Halfbridge… they’re not protected by the treaty. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Adventurer’s Guild issued a quest to kill any that tried.”

The goblin shrugged, unconcerned. “Laws can change. You humans gave up on fighting us, and trolls have a lot to offer. At least as long as you’re respectful.”

“I guess.” Bernt allowed. “But what do you mean about troll shamans? Do you mean they can get spirits to help them work stone? And if that’s right, why wouldn’t a goblin be able to do that?”

Nirlig shrugged. “Goblins are forest people, so we speak to forest spirits. The trolls are one with the mountains, so their shamans speak to the mountain spirits. I can’t hear whatever spirits wander around in the tunnels here, or up in the city. It should work here, though, with so many of us. We’ll need to develop the environment for a little while before we can get any of ours to come down.

What? Bernt did a double take. “You’re a shaman?” He looked like any other goblin. Then again, so did Grixit. Now that he considered it, he’d always just assumed that shamans would wear some kind of distinctive clothing, like priests or mages. But if they were also crafters and enchanters and the like, he supposed that might not be how it worked at all.

“Me? No.” Nirlig laughed. “I wouldn’t join the guard if I had that kind of influence. Besides, figuring out proper rituals and stuff to get their help is way too hard. I just chat with them sometimes. Kind of weird that humans don’t really ever seem to. They don’t bite or anything. Usually. As long as you’re polite.”

Bernt looked over at Jori. She was barely paying attention, skipping and spreading her wings to slow her descent as they walked when there was enough space to do so.

“Uh… I didn’t know we could. I don’t think most people do.”

“It’s not a secret.” Nirlig laughed. “They just don’t care. You don’t have any shamans, and we’re just savages who live in holes in the ground out in the forest, right?”

The goblin said the words lightly, like a joke, but Bernt heard the bitter undertone. It was too close to the truth to be funny.

“I don’t know.” Bernt said, matching the goblin’s tone. “I found out recently that you guys use spirits to enchant armor and such. I’d love to know more about that. I mean, who wouldn’t?”

Nirlig grinned at him. “I guess you met Grixit? That guy’s a genius. I mean, almost any shaman can get items infused, sure, but he can get you practically anything.”

“Uh. I thought you just get a spirit to do it…”

“Sure. Just. It sounds simple enough, I guess, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The really tricky thing with infusing stuff is communicating what you want to an incorporeal being whose entire existence is a reflection of some kind of natural phenomenon. And which is immortal – at least in the conventional sense. It can take a shaman years to finally get a spirit to grasp what they actually want, and they have to make sure to be patient and polite about it, too. And it’s not like they all agree on what's polite and what isn’t. I guess you could think of it like explaining color to a blind god and then asking them to make you something mauve.”

Bernt’s estimation of Grixit went up a notch. “So, he’s like a spirit-whisperer?”

Nirlig rolled his eyes. “What do you think a regular shaman is? No, Grixit’s a genius because he can understand them better than anyone else. If you can grasp how they think, you can work out how to communicate with them for all kinds of purposes, and how to trade for things.” The goblin gave him a slightly patronizing glance. “Well, you can’t communicate with them, but the rest of us would be able to – goblins, I mean.”

Bernt considered that for a moment. Sure, he had no talents in that direction, but that wasn’t true of everyone. But he didn’t mention what he’d learned about bards – that some humans clearly could communicate with spirits, and that they did so successfully enough to create their own enchanted – or “infused” tools. He didn’t really know how all that worked and besides, it wasn’t his secret to tell. Blabbing to anyone about guild secrets was never a good idea.

He considered asking about it further, but they emerged into the Undercity Market which was already coming to life with stalls from goblins, gnomes, dwarves and humans looking to capitalize on the traffic that streamed from the new neighborhoods through the market and up into the city, where most of them still worked – for now.

“You know. It’s fine.” Bernt said, casting a torch spell over one raised hand. “We don’t have shamans, but goblins don’t really have mages. We’re all here now – think of what we can do together!”

Nirlig’s seemingly inexhaustible smile widened.