He puts on his Darkvision and stays out of her way.

She picks directions without explaining herself and is generally pretty taciturn. She doesn't get out of his goggles' range, though.

They go deeper, and loosely southward, without finding much of anything, for a few hours.

He will stay quiet and out of trouble.

They catch bats for dinner and pause for a nap - she hasn't used up any spells, so it doesn't have to be long - in what appears to be an abandoned mushroom farm. She remarks on the layout and the smell; there aren't any objects left to tell by. When they're feeling rested she rearranges their possessions to look nonthreatening - he keeps his bow but she carries the arrows with the understanding that he doesn't have to ask for them if he needs them, just has to look like he would.

They press on through a not-abandoned mushroom farm, which smells much stronger, but don't meet the farmer; she elects not to go say hi, and just picks through rows of basket with fungus peeping out between the wires, careful not to disturb anything, till she finds what might be termed a road. It's smooth and wide on the bottom, all the major protrusions into the path have been hacked off, and it leads gently down, south by southeast, in one direction, and curves a bit west the other way. There is an honest to goodness sign painted on the wall, "Zeun", the capital of Shazeun, and an arrow, pointing in the southerly direction. It's quicker going from there.

They pass a married couple of drow coming up the path. Belmarniss engages the wife in conversation Hagan can't follow even when she gestures at him, makes the lady laugh, ignores the husband, keeps going. There are farms left and right, mostly mushroom, one with pigs which are eating mushrooms, one with a little glimmer of magic light and a not-mushroom smell wafting out of it. They see more and more branching road-tunnels.

And then they hit Zeun.

The city is not all in one cavern, but the highway does dump them in a central honeycomb chamber, ten stories high with ladders and stairs around the edges, and stone layers of marketplace in the center radiating bridges to some of those doors, with the top platform left clear and a trio of drow playing music and singing. Below them on all the other floors of the open stone structure, drow are buying and selling mushrooms, clothes, herbs, tools, weapons, jewelry, miscellany, and people.

Belmarniss motions Hagan a little closer to herself.

Wow. 

He keeps his head down. Steps a little closer.

She circles through the market.

She stops at a stall with a drow man selling fabric and fabric-related sundries and asks him some questions. Laughs a little stiltedly at some presumable joke. Gets some answers. Pulls out some coins, has a conversation about the coins, casts Light on a nearby bobbin to give him a better look at the coins, and manages to exchange them at unfair-to-her rates for some local currency - the drow silver is twice the size of surface coins and she pays triple, and she throws in a few extra surface gold for thinner drow ones, each pressed into a delicate arch after minting. He weighs the coins carefully in his hands as he accepts them, looking at her suspiciously; she makes a dismissive-sounding remark of some sort. He throws in a bolt of silk which the light reveals as slate grey. She hands it to Hagan over her shoulder.

It would be really nice to speak the local language. 

In Osirion - 

- he has some sort of cultural observation here but in his head it keeps coming out silly. In Osirion slaves are different, but, of course they are, he knew that and he's been to places where slaves are differently different. Maybe it's just that enslaving a gender is really weird.

She gets directions from the silk merchant guy and follows them to the edge of the market and up a flight of stairs, into a side tunnel-path where they can find a rock to sit on outside the metal door to some other section of town, perhaps a residence. Not obviously in earshot of anybody; music's barely audible from here.

"You look pensive."

"CIty's very pretty. I guess just because you oppress your men doesn't mean you do the same thing Osirion is doing but flipped."

"We do not! That guy's wife probably just doesn't like working shopfront. Or she's sick or something. It's a wife, not a mom, I've noticed all the obviously married guys around here have their hair over their ears and the ones who obviously aren't have it pulled back behind, I'm not sure if that's a... Shazeun ear modesty... thing or just an arbitrary signal but I'm pretty sure having walked around in there for a bit. Anyway, if you asked him he'd probably tell you he isn't a slave, he's a drow."

"Sure. They don't sell them in markets, they sell them in parlors?"

"There are so many trivial cosmetic differences they can imagine it's not the same thing under the hood. Parlors not markets, they don't do especially low-status work - some women do work shopfront, you don't find drow stirring nightsoil and sand and compost to make farm dirt unless something awful has happened to their family - they usually aren't resold, they get access to their kids by default unless the kids are dead, their wives give a shit about coexisting comfortably with them. Also, like, imagining telling somebody whose general competence as a person gets denominated in gold that if he lived upstairs and was a girl there his family would have to pay somebody to take him off their hands, isn't that the most insulting thing you ever heard."

"Guess so."

"I'd be kinda perversely interested in a study of concrete metrics of marital freedom between drow boys and Osirian girls. How many prospects did they meet, how many got their first choice, like that."

"Ooooh. That sounds interesting. I bet drow men are happier, just because having lots of children with no help is really really rough."

"If you can't afford a milk slave you don't have a kid, or if you fuck up and do have one you kill it immediately, yes. Anyway, it seems pretty chill down here. We can haul the silk up, win my bet, report in, that's really all they paid for, do you think I'll get a tip if I try to find the nearest noble family and pitch them on trade?"

"Probably!"

"See, I don't know why they wouldn't tell me that, I'd have been way more conservative about things without your telling me that and I think they benefit from me knowing. Okay, let's get dinner, you can try the mushrooms, we'll find an inn, should still set a watch in case I look too rich and friendless, and once we're up we can try that."

"All right. I dunno why they do anything they do, really, but you can complain to Merenre about that one when you get back."

"Perhaps I shall."

There are no restaurants in the market. Belmarniss asks directions from a drow girl who looks like she'd be seven if she were human who is muttering Taldane verbs to herself. Belmarniss justifies this interruption by asking also in Taldane. "Hey, where's the kitchen quarter in this city?"

"- what does kitchen mean?"

Belmarniss translates into drow.

"Oh! The kit-chen quarter is through that tunnel and the best place is Yuzua's."

"Is Yuzua your mom, or your grandma?"

"Nope."

"Liar." Belmarniss whistles a little, walking away from the giggling kid.

The tunnel to the kitchen quarter is a lot more crowded, so she can't stop to check in on the way there.

It's bigger than the market quarter across, but shallower, and it's full of restaurants, and a few non-restaurant areas with stoves and grills burning coal and individual drow and slaves cooking things there and hauling them out of the cave. A drow woman is taking coins for the use of the cookers. Belmarniss picks a restaurant without a line, which sells mushroom and fish stew in steel bowls; whether or not it is Yuzua's she doesn't say. She gets two bowls of it and nabs a place to sit which does not have a corresponding one for Hagan; if he looks around he can see there are a couple of slaves also eating restaurant food here today for other reasons and one is kneeling on the ground near his owner to eat off his knees and the other is standing beside the family that seems to own her, so probably he could pick one of those options.

Yeah, he'll stand. 

Osirion is so comparatively reasonable.

She makes short work of the food but strikes up conversation with a woman on the next bench. He can catch the words "Noctimar" and "Katapesh" and "Osirion" and "Shazeun" each once or twice if he's listening. Eventually she stands up and beckons to him and heads out of the kitchen quarter, up and over till she finds an inn. She exchanges gold for a room without ado; despite the watch set there's nothing untoward overnight.

She has directions to where to go looking for the princess of Zeun, from the kitchen quarter. After breakfast - more mushrooms - they descend into a new tunnel that slopes down and then turns into intermittent shallow stairs, spiraling around as it corkscrews deeper into the earth.

"You want a Tongues before we go see if the princess will talk to me? You still wouldn't talk, but you could at least follow along for an hour or so."

"It'd probably be more fun - you sure you won't need it for anything -"