Venom in Her Veins

Chapter Eight

Julen leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow. Zaltys had waited until nightfall to sneak away and investigate, which had given Julen ample time to convince her to bring him along. “I wish someone had given you a magical earth-moving pickaxe for your initiation.”

“At least the shadow armor doesn’t get dirty,” Zaltys replied, driving the shovel down again. She stood in a hole so deep that only her shoulders and head were aboveground, and she was beginning to think she’d never find the thing she both hoped and dreaded to discover.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Julen looked around at the canted walls, the shattered stone, and the fragments of unsettling carvings.

“I asked, long ago, where my family and the rest of the village was buried. Krailash brought me to this place, and said Quelamia had covered over their grave with earth and stone by magic. They picked this ruined structure because it was so recognizable, and would be easy to find, if I ever wanted to see it. I come every year. I leave flowers. And now? I’m beginning to think there aren’t any bodies buried under here at all. And if there are no bodies …”

“Then this isn’t a grave. And Alaia has been lying to you. And that means your village wasn’t killed, but taken.” Julen drove down with his shovel-and then yelped. Zaltys snapped her head up to look at him, and saw the shovel handle vanish from his hands. A moment later Julen burst out of his own shoulder-deep hole and scrambled away. “Zaltys! I hit something, or, I mean, I hit nothing-I broke through into some kind of cavern, and, ah, the shovel fell in. Sorry. I was surprised, and lost my grip.”

“Come on,” Zaltys said, without hesitation. She grabbed his hand and dragged him away from the temple, into the dark jungle. There were things among the trees worthy of her fear, but the only fear she felt was for whatever might be in the caverns beneath what she’d always believed was her original family’s final resting place.

Quelamia hadn’t buried her kinsmen. She’d buried the entry to the Underdark the slavers had used to breach the surface.

Julen gasped, trying to keep up as Zaltys pulled him through the jungle. She ran swiftly, her night vision exceptional as always, and then it occurred to her to step into a shadow. A sudden sensation of cold, a blur in her vision, and an instant later she emerged from another shadow, farther away. “No fair!” Julen said. “Some of us are stuck using our feet!”

Zaltys waited for him to catch up, and resisted the urge to step through more shadows, at least until they reached the edge of camp. “Stay here,” she said, and stepped toward a shadow cast by one of the ever-burning perimeter torches.

Julen caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

She didn’t look at him, or at anything in particular; she looked inward. “To get food, and rope, and an everburning torch, and a few potions, and a sword, and-”

“You’re going into the caves?” he said. “Zaltys, you can’t. Rainer was a hardened warrior, and it nearly killed him.”

“If my family is down there-my real family-I have to save them.”

“We’re your real family, Zaltys. I am.”

Her bleakness receded for a moment, and she met his eyes. “Yes, Cousin. You are. But so are they. If family is everything, how can I leave my family trapped in the dark? Enslaved? Mother, father, maybe brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins? I can’t.”

“Let’s talk to Krailash, then, organize a party, perhaps send a rider to bring back Rainer so he can tell us what to expect-”

“They’d never let me go down there tonight. They only just agreed to let me walk in the woods without an escort, Julen. They … it’s not their family, Julen. It’s mine. I have to do this.”

“At least wait until morning!” There was desperation in his voice.

“My family hasn’t seen a morning in seventeen years,” she said. “It’s always night in the Underdark.” She stepped into a shadow, and vanished from sight.

From the moment Julen first saw Zaltys in the camp, with her black hair pulled back from her face and tied up with a cord, dressed in dirty hunting leathers that couldn’t hide her trim and somehow sinuous shape, with those startlingly large, deep, intelligent green eyes and a little half-smile on her lips, Julen was lost. Oh, he’d admired her back in Delzimmer too, and of all the pretty cousins he’d looked on and fantasized about, she was foremost, but seeing her here, in her element, the longing for her had struck him like a physical blow to the chest. His initial attraction deepened into full infatution as he saw how she handled a bow and knife, observed her utter mastery of the jungle pathways, and sparred with her verbally. By the time the first tenday in the field was over, he’d decided Zaltys was the woman he wanted to marry.

Falling in love with anyone was a luxury generally denied to the family, and falling in love with such a close relative was ill-advised at best. But the restrictions on first-cousin relationships were waived when one member was an adoptee, and he could come up with sound strategic reasons to forge a fresh marriage bond between the Travelers and the Guardians of the family-perhaps even reasons his hardheaded father would concede. Of course the head of the Travelers spent half the year out in the field, a circumstance not conducive to marital harmony and one of the obvious reasons Alaia had never wed despite various close calls, but Julen was confident they could adapt to and overcome the difficulties of the circumstances. Assuming he could get Zaltys to look at him as anything other than her little cousin.

He was not even quite two years younger than her, and he was trying hard to make her laugh and impress her with his ability to avoid being eaten by giant spiders and carnivorous vines, but the most he’d gotten from her in terms of affection was a pat on the back and some ruffled hair. He still might have simply enjoyed and agonized in the frustrated bliss of being so close to the untouchable object of his affection, but the prospect of a summer spent insinuating his way into her affections suddenly seemed in danger. Of course Zaltys wanted to charge into the Underdark, despite her total ignorance of the realm and its dangers, to save some people she’d never met, just because they happened to be related by an accident of blood. Julen could have told her that birth parents weren’t so great-his own mother was essentially a work of art observed from afar, a beautifully-attired and impossibly distant matron who spent most of her time in her chambers with her lady’s maids, while his father was a more frequent and altogether more harrowing presence in his life. But Zaltys hadn’t given him the chance to make those arguments, nor would they have meant much to her anyway, he suspected.

When she vanished, leaving him alone on the edge of the camp, his first thought was to go to Alaia and warn her, but he knew Zaltys would perceive that as a betrayal, and it would ruin any chance he had of being more than a soft city boy in her eyes. He considered going to Krailash, in hopes of enlisting his help to intercept Zaltys and convince her not to do anything impulsive, but he knew the dragonborn would tell his mistress what her daughter had tried to do, so betrayal would still be an issue. Besides, Zaltys would be hard to hold, given the capabilities of the armor Quelamia had made for her, and she was the kind of person who would exert heroic effort to do something she’d been ordered not to do.

So there was nothing for it. Julen would just have to go after Zaltys on his own. He didn’t have her ability to step from shadow to shadow, but he could move pretty fast when the need arose, and she’d have to spend some time digging to widen the hole his shovel had fallen through sufficiently to squeeze herself through. He entered camp and made his way to his campsite, near the inner ring of carts, and picked up his pack. The bag seemed unusually heavy, so he opened it up, and frowned at what he saw inside.

In addition to his clothes and spare knives and antitoxins and lockpicks, there was a pouch of trail rations; flint and steel; an everburning torch; a piece of blue chalk; and a small clear crystal bottle with a stopper. The latter looked sort of familiar, but surely it couldn’t be … He pulled the stopper and tipped some of the clear fluid inside onto the ground. The level of water in the bottle didn’t change at all. His father had a bottle much like this one, though the crystal was a different color; he jokingly called it his drought insurance. That bottle had a connection to the plane of elemental water, and would pour forth pure water forever, albeit in a small trickle. It was a powerful magic item, and now someone had given him its twin. He continued digging through the bag and found, sheathed, a small dagger that wasn’t his own. When he drew the knife, he was surprised to see the blade was bound in verdigris, and the hilt worked with a pattern of green enameled leaves and vines. A green jewel set in the hilt of the dagger pulsed with a gentle light when his thumb touched it, and his eyes widened. The dagger was magical. What it did, exactly, he didn’t know, but it was no ordinary knife. It was a gift from someone who wished to remain anonymous, obviously.

That meant he had an ally in camp, someone who knew he was going to go into the Underdark, presumably-someone who knew Zaltys was going there too. Who could know such a thing? There was a psion somewhere in camp-he’d never met her-charged with erasing the memories of the laborers and guards after the caravan returned to Delzimmer, so they couldn’t reveal the secret location of the terazul vines. It was said some psions could perceive possible futures, so perhaps the mysterious figure had seen a vision of Zaltys’s quest. Or it could be the wizard Quelamia-she was an eladrin, an otherworldly race that had untold powers, and she certainly seemed to know more about everything than anyone else. And, of course, Alaia was a shaman with a profound connection to the natural world and the ability to observe the actions of others in secret through the eyes of her spirit companions, but what motive would any of them have to help him pursue Zaltys? Why wouldn’t they simply stop her?

He didn’t have time to think about it. If he was going to catch up with Zaltys before she lost him in the caverns underground, he needed to move.

Julen shouldered his pack and headed nonchalantly for the perimeter, past the guards and laborers who took no notice of him, hiding once behind a cart while Krailash went striding by on some errand or another. He wasn’t supposed to leave camp unescorted, since even the seventh heir to the Guardians was a valuable commodity, and if any of the guards had seen him, they would have stopped him.

But he wasn’t a child. He was an operative trained by the best agents in the Guardians, and if he didn’t want to be seen, no one in camp would see him.

Someone in camp did see him creep off into the jungle, though not with ordinary eyes, and that watcher smiled. Things were moving forward as expected. Events underground would be unpredictable, and it might all still end in tragedy, but there was reason to be hopeful. Justice might yet be done, and order restored, and catastrophic futures of madness and death averted. Giving Julen the knife instead of Zaltys was a gamble, but if Zaltys failed, perhaps Julen could succeed in her place. That would be sad, of course, and would annoy the other party to the arrangement, but the watcher was concerned only with results, not with the cost of attaining those results.

Being concerned with anything else, given the situation, was a sure path to heartbreak.