Venom in Her Veins

Chapter Fourteen

Julen had heard drowning was actually a very peaceful way to die, second only to dying of exposure in a snowstorm, where, as he understood it, the snow actually began to feel soothing and warm, and you simply dropped off to a sleep from which you never awoke.

He’d never actually seen snow, so he couldn’t speak to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of such a death, but he felt quite qualified to state that drowning was, in fact, a truly horrible way to die. Drowning while chained with no possibility of saving oneself through heroic physical effort was even worse for being more psychologically debilitating. Drowning, while chained, in the crushing blackness of the Underdark, while also failing to help the cousin you were in love with, seemed to him perhaps the worst way to die of all.

He tried to hold his breath at first, of course, hoping the derro would save him somehow. Julen was supposed to be a slave, after all, a valuable commodity, and letting him die in a pool of water seemed irresponsible. It was certainly bad business. Julen thought fleetingly that a member of the Traders would never allow such wastage, which was a point in their favor. But derro were mad. Maybe his captor had drowned as well, or simply been distracted by a passing prey animal or a shiny stone, and forgotten all about his prisoner.

Holding his breath was hard, because the shock of hitting the icy water had driven the air from his lungs, and he felt the need to suck in air almost immediately. After what seemed an hour but was probably no more than a minute, blackness began to creep into the edges of his vision. That surprised Julen, because the bottom of the pool was already black, utterly lightless, but there was a greater blackness encroaching. Then a new sensation began, like his chest being squeezed in the hands of a giant, and his eyes prickled and burned, and his brain felt hot in his skull.

And he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. He sucked in a breath, and water filled his nostrils and his throat.

After that it was actually rather peaceful, though only because he lost consciousness.

The peace didn’t last long. Someone struck him hard on the back and he vomited water, no longer ice cold, but warmed from being inside his body. Julen gagged, shuddered, and convulsed, the muscles of his abdomen clenching and unclenching painfully, and he stared at the puddle on the stones before him. He was on his belly, still chained, in a not-entirely-dark cavern, and he was alive, though he felt like he’d been turned inside out, and every breath was like a rasp being drawn across his innards.

“Good strong boy,” his derro captor said, and smacked him on the back again, hard. “You’ll make a good worker. You died a little there, I think. See anything interesting, in death? Any secrets? I like secrets.”

“A snake,” Julen said, remembering as he spoke. His voice was a serrated croak. He couldn’t think of any snake gods, though his aunt the shaman had mentioned a World Serpent once or twice, some kind of primal spirit, he gathered. Was that what he’d seen? It seemed rather darker than that. And insofar as he’d been able to read its expression, the creature had seemed amused by his death-a malicious pleasure, not wise understanding. The vision he’d seen was more like a snake made of shadows, not unlike the one Zaltys had killed and he’d skinned. Perhaps it was simply that snake’s ghost, waiting beyond death to take revenge on Julen’s own spirit. Happy thought.

The snake in his vision had been a lot larger than the shadow snake, though. And it had looked much smarter, and more hungry.

“Snake? Hmm.” The derro continued thumping him on the back, though less violently. “The serpent is a great symbol. Mythic ancestor of great heroes. Devourer and progenitor, cyclical manifestations, the transformation of death into life. Seer, healer, sea monster, tempter, death in the dark, worm with pretensions, keeper of earthly knowledge, wellspring of poison. A vision of snakes can mean almost anything.” He shrugged. “I was a savant once, before I was a slaver. My gift was to interpret the dreams of the Slime King. But the Slime King doesn’t sleep, so they gave me shackles and a whip and sent me to do useful work instead.” He jerked Julen’s chain and began dragging him again, around the perimeter of the dark pool. The light there came from red crystals, so faint they’d been invisible under the water, but bright enough to see by once he’d been saved.

Julen realized his path was totally obscured. Zaltys was an excellent tracker, but even she wouldn’t be able to trace his passage down a waterfall. He was well and truly trapped with the lunatic and his mad people. Death was almost literally the best thing he could hope for.

Then his captor sprouted an arrow from his throat, gurgled, and fell. “Zaltys!” Julen shouted, exalted.

But it wasn’t Zaltys that rose up from the pool’s black water, and when the derro’s corpse began moving, he realized it wasn’t an arrow that had killed his captor, but a harpoon-a harpoon being reeled toward the pool by its wielder, who watched Julen with huge, watery eyes.

Suddenly the derro, which at least looked vaguely human and sometimes spoke his language-even if they said things that didn’t make sense-didn’t seem so bad. The creature with the harpoon was joined by three others, emerging from the water silently.

“Kuo-toa,” Julen whispered. The drawings he’d seen in the books on the Underdark in the family library didn’t do the creatures justice. “Loathsome fish-things,” that was how they’d been described, and while they bore enough resemblance to ordinary fish to assure he’d never enjoy a seafood dinner ever again, they were as big as humans, with hands that could grip weapons, and fangs protruding from their jaws. The one with the harpoon pulled the derro into the pool-the same pool where Julen himself had so recently drowned. Those things had been underneath him? The pool must connect to some subterranean network of rivers traveled by the creatures. No wonder it was considered a dangerous route. Bug-eater had been wise to take the long way down. It was faster, and maybe even fun if you weren’t chained up when you went flying from the river into the pool, but you ran the risk of being captured by fish-monsters who worshiped unheard-of gods.

Zaltys was sufficiently energized by her successful massacre of the floating jellyfish monsters that she almost wanted to shout for the derro to come out and face her, thinking she could pretty easily put them down too, but good sense won out over suicidal self-confidence. She didn’t worry about the light of her sunrod, assuming that, by that point, she’d fallen so far behind Julen’s captors that there was little chance of running into them, and reluctant to plunge herself into darkness again. Light was hard to give up once she had it. She soon realized the sunrod wasn’t strictly necessary, though. Even beyond the reach of her light she could see patches of illumination as she wound through tunnels with her snake companion.

She’d heard stories of rangers who formed close bonds with animals-actual animals, not the spectral pig her mother could summon-but she’d never expected to pick up a pet against her will. Perhaps the snake just thought following her was a good survival strategy. Any predator they encountered would probably focus on Zaltys first, both because she was more obviously a threat and because her body would provide a lot more sustenance when eaten.

Zaltys eventually reached a cavern crawling with hideous fist-sized insects with green, glowing bodies. What could they possibly be feeding on? Probably better if she didn’t know. She kicked a few out of her way, and noticed the smushed remains of several bodies. Good. Even without chalk marks, it was clear someone had passed that way recently, probably being dragged. There were two tunnels leaving from the room, one heading left, one right. She peered into the dimness, and didn’t see much to choose between them. The drag-path through the crushed bodies looked like it bore right, but it was hard to say-at least two other humanoids had tromped around the fork in the path, killing their own bugs, and the surviving insects were rapidly trundling away with the bodies of their fallen, presumably for a nice snack rather than a proper burial, which further obscured the signs of passage.

She chose right, for no particular reason other than intuition, but didn’t have to go far to have her intuition proved wrong. The roar of water rose, and the light from her sunrod revealed that the tunnel narrowed and merged with a rushing stream of water-very nearly a river-which disappeared down a long slope and wound out of sight. Hard to imagine slavers going that way, even if they were mad.

She retraced her steps, the snake unperturbed by the change in direction, and went down the other tunnel. That one was rather twistier and more circuitous, no bigger than the narrow hallways in the servants’ quarters of the family villa back home, and though the slope was never terribly steep, she was certainly descending ever downward. There were no more chalk marks, which was worrisome. She rounded a curve and found a derro bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, vomiting noisily. The puddle on the floor had chunks of glowing green bug parts in it, and when he looked up at her, the derro’s white beard was streaked with luminous juices. His eyes, permanently wide anyway, widened farther. Zaltys was too close even to fire the hand crossbow, so she stepped forward, spun on the ball of her foot, and smashed him in the face with her elbow. The derro’s head snapped back and bashed against the stone wall, leaving him dazed long enough for Zaltys to sweep his feet out from under him. After he hit the floor, she snatched the iron shackles from his belt and snapped them onto his wrists, where they magically tightened.

But she had a problem. She could kill him, but something in her balked at murdering a humanoid that was unconscious and chained-the jellyfish-things might have had a rich culture and vast intellects, but they looked sufficiently inhuman that she hadn’t hesitated to slay them. The derro, on the other hand, looked almost like a child, and even knowing he was a sadistic cruel slave-taker who’d stolen her original family couldn’t sufficiently steel her to put a dagger in his eye. She could try to wake him up and force him to tell her where his people lived, as she’d originally planned, but knowing how mad the creatures were, how could she trust anything he said? If she just left him there, though, one of his brethren would surely discover him eventually and raise the alarm, and since she was in the caverns of the derro, they’d surely find her no matter how skilled she was at melting into shadow.

Better to stash him out of sight somewhere, so if he woke up, no one would find him for a while. Surely there was a useful dark hole she could stuff him into, even though he hadn’t seen any branch paths at all along the winding tunnel. Continuing forward was dangerous-what if he’d been part of a larger group that had moved on when he felt the need to empty his guts of bug meat? They might be back soon.

She sighed. She could think of one place to take him. After disarming the derro-and burdening herself with his weapons, so they wouldn’t be found littering the tunnel-she bound his bootlaces together to make a handle, and started dragging him by the feet behind her, back the way she’d come. The weight of the two packs she was carrying was bad enough, but she also had to drag someone who, though small, didn’t weigh that much less than she did. All those hours roaming the jungles were time well spent, and she was up to the physical task, but it was exhausting.

Looking back once, she saw the albino snake had climbed onto the derro’s chest and lay coiled there, apparently asleep. There was something profoundly odd about that animal.

Finally she made it back to the cavern of bugs, and hauled the derro toward the right-hand tunnel. There was no reason any derro would venture into a dead-end that led to an icy waterfall, so it was probably a safe place to stash him. As the noise of roaring water grew, the derro jerked and twisted in her grip, and she dropped his legs, whirling to face him. He shouted something guttural, and though Zaltys couldn’t understand the language, she understood the tone-terror. “What?” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you.”

“Not down there,” the derro gasped as the snake slithered off his chest. “No … throw water.”

Zaltys frowned. “Why on earth would I throw you into the …”

Her eyes fell on something glowing faintly blue in the shadows. She hadn’t noticed it before. At first she thought it was more of that damnable glowing fungus, but it wasn’t. It was a stub of chalk-the chalk Julen had used to mark his passage. Zaltys looked at the rushing waterfall. “Did you throw my cousin down there?” Her voice was level and steady, and so was her hand when she drew the repeating crossbow and pointed it at the derro’s face. “Did you?”

“No, no me. Other me. Water faster. But not safer.”

“You mean another derro took Julen? You travel this way?”

“Fast way. Fast way down.” The derro gabbled something in his own tongue, which didn’t prove illuminating, but Zaltys understood enough. She considered putting a bolt through one of the creature’s wide white eyes-the terrible cold fury and howling emptiness she’d felt when she thought the derro had drowned Julen for sport still lingered. But she lowered the crossbow. She would kill derro in the tunnels, she was sure, but she didn’t have to start with him.

Zaltys took a moment to strap her packs together more firmly, verify that her bow case was well sealed, and make sure everything that shouldn’t get wet was wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Back in Delzimmer, there was a grassy hill behind the main villa, with a steep slope covered in long grasses, and some of the Serrat children would take mats of woven reeds out and use them to sled down the hill, laughing as they reached tremendous speeds. Zaltys had always found that fun. Maybe the river would be fun too. Except wetter, and colder, and descending into unknown depths, and then there was the matter of the bug-eating derro saying that way was “not safer.”

Safety was fairly low on her list of concerns, though.

With a last check that her equipment was secure, Zaltys climbed down onto a stone outcroppping and lowered herself beside the water, just where it came rushing out of a crack in the rock. She reached down, putting her hand in the water-cold! — and feeling the stone beneath, which was at least worn refreshingly smooth. Tearing herself open on a sharp outcropping would be no fun at all. Holding her packs in front of her, with the straps tied around her chest, and the sunrod clutched in one hand, she slipped into the water. That part of the slope was almost flat, which meant she’d have to launch herself forward deliberately.

She took a breath, hoped there’d be a soft landing at the end, and scooted forward, consigning herself to gravity. At least she’d finally be rid of that unusually clingy snake.

Just before she was well out of earshot, the derro shouted something. She wasn’t entirely sure the word was in her language, and it didn’t seem to mean anything in particular, but it rang in her head as she rode the river down deeper into the dark.

The word had sounded like “fishmeat.”