Shaddar backs from the royal chamber of the elder brain with respect. Once he has passed beneath the arch of the doorway, the doors slowly shut behind him. He can feel the lingering resonance between the elder brain and the brainmate that he cradles in his hands. With the briefest of pauses, Shaddar continues to focus on the mystery of the brainmate, but quickly decides that he does not have enough information and resolves to ponder upon it later.
“This way, slave,” he projects into the mind of Ped’fraxith with a flick of one tentacle. The gargoyle’s flare of annoyance is sweet.
As they walk into more populated areas of the city, they begin to pass other inhabitants. The vast majority of those that they see are thralls – proper illiithids rarely leave their chambers when they can have a slave do the mundane tasks for them, as his master is so fond of reminding him at every opportunity. Most of the thralls show befitting respect towards him and a few actually stop walking to bow low as he passes. The thoughts and feelings that the thralls have are interesting. Most of the thralls in the city have been thoroughly subdued, but a few still harbor feelings of resentment or even a desire to escape. Ridiculous.
Soon they arrive at the communal thrall barracks. A series of rough tubes cut into the rock that allowed the thralls a place to sleep for the three or four hours that is their due. Shaddar mentally summons the thralls who normally work with his master in his experiments. One by one, they awaken and shuffle before him.
First to arrive is the elf maiden, Eesha. Her dark skin makes her difficult to spot in the dim light, but her mind is quick and filled with resentment – that mental fire burns bright. She has not taken well to being a thrall and is always trying to break the unbreakable bond which has been formed. No illithid wants such a daily headache and so the entire community uses her to do a variety of humiliating tasks. “Eventually, she will crack and be a proper thrall,” thinks Shaddar.
“Ack! Curses!” yelps a small, gray gnome as he stumbles to the line, rubbing his head with a damp rag. Cutt Rubydust has somehow managed to let a tanglefoot bag of glue get into the few remaining hairs on his bald pate. His appearance is insignificant. Only his skill at alchemy is important; too important for a single illithid to own him.
A fiendish-sounding cackle announces the arrival of the demented dwarf, Tuthoad. His unholy experiments have allowed him to master the summoning and grafting of demon-flesh appendages to mortals. The torn bat wings at his back and his constantly moving, 15-foot-long tail bear testimony to his unique skills. They also bear witness to the mental instability that experimenting on one’s own body indicates.
Bubbling and wet popping sounds precede the approach of the final thrall Shaddar came here to collect. Loolipo is a sneaky and lazy thrall, hated by most of the others. Her sole redeeming feature, from their perspective, is that she always sleeps in the bottom-most tube that is constantly half-filled with water. Being a kuo-toa, she is quite at home in the damp and the mud. Her nimble fingers and skill with a pincher staff are useful to Felinxtrath’s current needs.
Satisfied at the quick response of the thralls, Shaddar turns without a word, knowing that they will follow him. They travel deeper into the lower levels of the city, where the personal thrall apartments and slave pits are located.
The thoughts of the lessor races that Shaddar senses around him become more fearful in their nature the closer they come to the slave pits. Some minds have the intriguing flavor of being completely shattered into madness.
“Such fragile things,” Shaddar thinks, “It is no wonder that our race will rule the entire universe someday. Only we are strong enough to do what must be done.”
The stench of unclean flesh and misery hangs thick in the air as they enter the slave area. Here is where those captives who are unfit for duty as thralls are kept until their bodies (or their brains) are needed by their betters.
A fat-fleshed illithid sits behind a table heavy with stacks of documents. His drooping eyes turn up and he greets Shaddar with his mind.
“Ah, Shaddar! I assumed that you would be coming by today.” His disgusting, ill-groomed tentacles are barely able to gesticulate properly, they are so corpulent. “Has it been three weeks? You are here to take sustenance? I have a drow fellow here that you might like. Very clever – many adventures, he has had. Only one arm, but nothing wrong with his mind! Felinxtrath asked me to save him. For you?”
Shaddar has been a victim to this type of taunting many times before. He knows that he has three days before he may next feed. Despite himself however, he is unable to stop his lamprey-like mouth from watering and corrosive slime drips down his tentacles to the cavern floor. His master keeps him at the very edge of starvation and only allows him to consume the brain of injured and aged thralls once every three weeks. Only once did Felinxtrath allow him to consume the brain of a slave – a young adventurer whose memories and experiences were orders of a magnitude better than a used-up and discarded thrall with decades of non-thought stored in the dusty recesses of its mind. His master did not give him that gnome as a reward, but as a torture. Only by knowing and comparing the quality of that gnomish brain could every thrall brain he had been given since then be understood for what it was: the bitter dregs that his betters had left behind.
Baliforn laughs in a single explosive twitch of tentacles at the sight of Shaddar’s drooling and at the angry thoughts he has listened in on.
“Oh, dear. My mistake! Not today after all, is it? And surely sure a dainty morsel is not for the likes of you, eh?” he thinks jovially, seemingly oblivious to the anger evident in Shaddar’s features. The slave pit jailer’s tentacles continue to twitch in amusement as he shuffles a few of the parchments on his desk. “Now then, you are here for some slaves for Felinxtrath’s experiments? Bah! Half of the time, they come back in a state that’s not fit to be eaten. That’s a waste of good brains, if you ask me.” At last Baliforn finds the requisition and passed it over to be signed. Shaddar sweeps the pen across the form quickly before studiously ignoring the continuing gestures and mental probes of Baliforn and turning to the gargoyle.
“Collect four slaves. They must be in good condition.”
Ped’fraxith nods and eagerly enters the slave pits. This was one thrall that did not mind so much the more cruel tasks his masters required of him. Soon the cries of terrified victims were heard coming from the entrance.
It was several more minutes before the gargoyle returned with two drow, a dwarf, and a gnome, all bound together via a chain at their necks. None of them were young, and the dwarf was quite obviously insane, but all seemed physically sound. The old gnomish woman wrings her hands constantly as if the motion will grant her comfort. Unlikely in the extreme.
Quickly now, they march to the experiment chamber. The only sounds are an occasional wet noise from Loolipo’s rubbery lips and some quiet sobs from the old gnome.
Felinxtrath’s most powerful thrall stands guard. The hulking bulk of a minotaur in his prime snorts at the sounds of their advance. Leaning on a massive axe, he opens the door for Shaddar’s little caravan. Jor Toothsnatcher he calls himself in his own thoughts. Shaddar hardly bothers to scan those thoughts – the beast is practically brain-dead so far as he is concerned.
Once the door to the room is open to the view of the slaves, the old gnomish woman shrieks and begins to tear at the metal collar at her throat. The room had obviously once served as a torture chamber and she is terrified. Before Shaddar or any of the thralls can react to the distressed slave, a blast of mental power scorches from the interior of the room – stunning all of the slaves and some of the thralls into a frozen state of near-paralysis.
“Incompetent fools! Do not let them damage themselves!” The enraged visage of Felinxtrath himself fills the doorway. His resplendent robes are embroidered with gold thread and jewels. The veins in his high-domed head throb as he examines the slave woman. All is well. Seeing that the drama has ceased, he releases the thralls for his mind blast, and gives them mental commands. The four communal thralls hurry into the room. Then, with disgust, he turns to Shaddar, “Your incompetence knows no bounds, tadpole. Give me the brainmate.”
Shaddar hands the precious brainmate to his master and enters the room. Once he is inside, the gargoyle and the minotaur also enter and stand guard on either side of the door. Their given tasks completed, both of their faces go slack and still. The minotaur’s mouth drops open and he breathes slowly and deeply, as if asleep. The gargoyle turns into an immobile-looking statue that is the common trait of his race when they stand still.
“Prepare yourself for the experiment, Shaddar. I will not abide any further mistakes this day,” his master snarls verbally. A great insult this is among the illithid! Only those of lesser intellects lack the ability to speak mind-to-mind. Speaking aloud to another of the race is tantamount to calling them out as unworthy of their place in mindflayer society. Shaddar turns to his work to avoid thinking or saying something that will earn him another beating.
Each slave is chained to a torture rack, their arms and legs being stretched taut by Loolipo, but not painfully so. Not yet. Cutt smears each victim with an alchemical goo and attaches tubes to them. Strips of flexible copper are affixed to the fetters of each slave by Eesha. Tuthoad is at the controls, calling out when each connection has been made satisfactorily.
The control console was once a desk, but has now been bolted to the floor and is covered with small burners, vials of magical liquids, and mechanical dials and levers. Each tube and metallic strip snakes across the stained floor to this console, making it look like a bizarre altar to a forgotten god of magic mechanisms. From this altar of illithidian technology a single cable runs to the throne. An iron chair with a high back. At the apex of the chair’s back sits a massive crystal in a geared setting – immobile for as long as Shaddar has seen it, but looking as if it should be able to rotate along its long axis. In the throne sits the arrogant figure of Shaddar’s master, Felinxtrath, drumming his long fingers impatiently as he watches the activity before him.
Shaddar checks every task to insure that the connections are secure just as the slaves begin to snap out of the effects of the mind blast. The little gnome woman begins to weep and cry out loudly at once. Everyone in the room ignores her.
“Excellent,” Felinxtrath thinks to the group, “Set the tolerance levels to 24. The memory wormage factor should be 2.1 and at a 60% flow rate.” Quickly the uncomprehending fingers of the thralls make the declared adjustments. Even Shaddar does not fully understand the forces involved in these experiments. However, unlike every previous time, his master seems very confident of his figures. Very confident, indeed.
Felinxtrath relaxes into the throne for a moment, seeming to savor something only he can see. Then he leans forward intensely, both hands tightly gripping the armrests of his iron chair.
“Begin!”
< Chapter 1 Chapter 3 >
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