Venom in Her Veins

Chapter Nine

Alaiawasn’t in her wagon, fortunately, so Zaltys was able to fill her pack in peace and take a few of the healing potions kept in the emergency stores in her mother’s locked chest. Once she’d finished packing-her hands shaking with anxiety, excitement, and other, less identifiable emotions-she almost stepped into a shadow, but she stopped by her mother’s little folding desk first.

Zaltys sat down, pulled the writing surface down and locked it into place, opened a drawer, and took out one of the small sheets of paper her mother used to write messages to send back to the city. She dipped a pen in her mother’s inkwell, considered, and wrote a few brief lines. She folded the paper and wrote her mother’s name on it, then took another sheet, and wrote a slightly longer note. After folding that one, she wrote “Krailash” on the outside. She didn’t seal the notes with wax, partly because she didn’t want to take the time, and partly because a blob of wax wouldn’t stop her mother from reading the note addressed to Krailash if she decided to do so. Zaltys wondered if Alaia would respect her privacy or not, but in a sort of distant, theoretical way. After years of being profoundly concerned with earning her adopted mother’s respect, Zaltys found that, this night, she didn’t care at all. To let her believe all these years that she’d been the sole survivor of a massacre, instead of the sole escapee from a village enslaved … She could understand why her mother had lied to her, but that didn’t mean she would forgive her.

Satisfied with her arrangements, Zaltys stepped into a shadow in the corner of the wagon, emerging on the edge of camp-and stumbling to her knees as darkness crept in on the edges of her vision.

Oh. The darkness receded, and she rose unsteadily to her feet. Her new shadow armor was magical, yes, but magic had limits, and could exert a strain on those who used it, something she knew intellectually but had seldom experienced personally. It was just as well. She probably shouldn’t learn to depend on the armor’s capabilities-it might make her naturecraft lazy. Better to keep the shadow-shifting power as an option of last resort.

She set off into the woods, back to the purported grave site of her family, a grave which might, remarkably, lead instead to her saving their lives. If there were derro slavers in the area looking for Rainer, she could capture one, and force it to lead her to the slaves, where she could reunite with her long-lost people. A lot of girls, she knew, dreamed of discovering they were secretly princesses, and of rejoining their rightful families and being lifted out of poverty. But how many adopted princesses went in search of their original families, who were almost certainly simple jungle-dwelling villagers or refugees?

Family is family, she thought.

As she crossed the stone plaza where she’d been found as a baby, she thought she heard something, a sibilant whisper, and she spun, drawing her short blade. Something slithered across the stones-something that looked like a headless shadow snake.

Is my armor haunted by the ghost of its owner? she thought, terrified by the idea. She feared nothing she could shoot or stab, but ghosts … She’d never heard of haunted armor, but there were stories of cursed magical items, and what was a ghost but a curse with a point of view?

The shadow snake didn’t vanish, but lingered at the edge of the plaza, and after a moment’s hesitation she stepped toward it. The snake began moving, and Zaltys followed.

And began to wonder if she was having a dream, that dream, because apart from her headless guide, it was exactly like her recurring nightmares: walking down the path, toward the pit. The stone grate was more moss-encrusted, chipped, and weathered than it was in her dreams, but otherwise it was the same, a circle easily a dozen feet across with a trapdoor of old, rusted metal set in the center. The shadow snake slithered into one of the holes in the grate-a hole far too small for it, too small for anything bigger than a human finger, but the ghosts of shadow snakes were apparently untroubled by mere physical reality.

Did she dare open the trapdoor? She stepped onto the grate, testing it with her foot first and finding it reassuringly solid. Was it, perhaps, some other entry to the Underdark? Were the visions a message from some god or another, meant to help her save her family?

“So hungry. So thirsty.”

That voice didn’t sound inside her head, but from the depths of the pit. It was a dry, dusty, rattling voice. “Who’s there?” Zaltys said.

“Child of Zehir,” the voice said. “You have neglected your old king. I hunger, and my hungers hunger. Where are the people?”

She’d asked her mother who Zehir was, the first time the name was spoken in her dreams, and her mother had frowned. “A god of darkness and deception,” she said, “beloved of poisoners and assassins. Nothing you need to concern yourself with.” The family deity was Waukeen, goddess of merchants and trade, though Alaia also kept a shrine to Mielikki, goddess of the forest and of rangers. As a shaman, she had little use for gods in general, since her connection to the primal magic of the world was rather more direct, but as she said, a little reverence couldn’t hurt, and shows of piety reassured the workers. But they were good deities-or at least deities unopposed to goodness-while Zehir …

“Why do you call me a child of Zehir?” she said. “I don’t worship … that.”

“You are an instrument of the god, as am I,” the voice whispered. “You even come to me arrayed in shadow. You are death from the dark. You are poison and revenge. Set me free, and we will conquer. Set me free, and I will raise you high. Set me free, and we-”

Zaltys fled, running away from the pit. Krailash knew a lot about the yuan-ti-she gathered some of them, far away from here, had once killed a number of his friends-and he spoke, sometimes, of the serpentfolk who’d once lived in this jungle, and the horrible god-monsters called anathemas that they kept trapped in pits even as they venerated them. The voice must belong to such a beast, or something even worse, and she couldn’t let it hypnotize her or confuse her or fill her head with lies. No doubt it whispered to anyone who came close enough, and it was surely the source of her dreams, as well. Perhaps being a native of this jungle, however long since removed, made her unusually susceptible to the creature’s powers. But she was strong; she was an heir to the Serrat family. She could not be tricked that way.

When she finally reached the false grave, shaken by her encounter with something from her dreams, she found someone waiting for her. “Julen,” she said. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.”

Julen sighed and drove down the shovel again. “Of course it’s dangerous. Just walking through the jungle to get here was dangerous-I trod on something that tried to eat my boot. But here I am. I can’t let you go alone. I’m surprised I got here before you, though.”

Unwilling to mention the snake and the pit, she said, “I had to write a note before I left. I told you, this isn’t your problem, I’m going to save my family-”

“You’re my family,” he said. “So your family is also my family. ‘This-and-thus,’ as my father says, whenever he wants me to understand something is self-evident.”

“My mother will kill me if anything happens to you.”

“Your mother will have my father kill me if she finds out I let you go into a nasty hole in the ground without trying to stop you. So take me along and let me keep trying to talk you out of this.”

Zaltys crossed her arms. “No. I won’t let you go. Not even if I have to tie you up and leave you here.”

“You don’t have any choice, Cousin,” he said cheerfully, lying on his belly beside the hole, peering into the depths and probing around with the shovel. “You can’t tie me up for long. I’m trained by the Guardians-we’re tough to tie down. And even if you could, say if you knocked me unconscious first, you can’t leave me asleep or tied up out in the jungle. I’d be eaten by something. And if you try to leave without me, I’ll start yelling, and the scouts will hear me, and come over, and Krailash will haul you out by the scruff of your neck.”

“This is blackmail!”

“Yes.” He rose and tossed the shovel aside. “I’m blackmailing you into letting me help you. I’m a monster. Listen, Zaltys. What do you know about the Underdark?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, then shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s deep. It’s big. It’s dark. Wet. Dank. Slimy. Drow live down there, and other things, I guess. Derro, apparently.”

“Right. You don’t know anything. But you know my brother Malon makes all our trade arrangements with the dwarves and the drow, he’s been down underground loads of times, and I’ve heard all about it, not even including what I read in the books and scrolls my father’s forced on me. I know a few things you could stand to find out. What do you know about glowstone?”

“Stone. That glows.” She heard the petulance in her own voice, and hated it.

“Ha. And wormrock? It’s not rock made out of worms, I’m afraid. How about Ghaunadaur, the Elder Eye?”

“Some kind of monster god, isn’t he?” she said, vaguely remembering horror stories told by other kids. “Lives underground?”

“He’s one of the gods worshiped in the Underdark. Not that I expect us to run into him, or Lolth either, but it’s good to know about the presiding deities, don’t you think? How about darkrock? The Upperdark and the Lowerdark? Purple worms? Fungal altars? Doomlight crystals? Aboleths?” He shuddered. “I hope those are nothing but stories and legends, but if they’re not …”

“Fine, you know more than I do. Though I don’t know how much things you learned from books or stories will help us in the dark.”

“They can hardly hurt us,” he said. “And I’ll note you’re saying ‘us,’ now, too.” He gestured to the hole. “I made a better opening to the cavern underneath. What do you say we lower a rope and get this over with?”

She stepped closer to her cousin, torn between frustration and affection. “Julen, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Then we’re in agreement.” He touched her cheek and grinned. “I don’t want me to get hurt, either.”

Zaltys went down the rope first, followed by Julen. They couldn’t see anything much at all, and Julen whispered, “First decision: do we make a light? It might call attention to us.”

“We won’t get far if we can’t see. And if the light does bring a derro to us, so much the better-we can force it to tell us where the slaves are kept.” She took a sunrod from her pack and struck the golden tip against the rough stone floor. Light flared at the end of the iron rod, illuminating the space around them. The sunrods were an alchemical marvel, or else magical-she wasn’t sure. The light they cast was steadier than torchlight, but sunrods were less useful than torches for setting enemies or their dwellings on fire. You couldn’t have everything.

The cavern was the size of the great hall in the family meeting house, full of rubble and dust. The shovel Julen had lost earlier was on the ground. He folded the shovel and tied it to the outside of his pack. It was unwieldy, but Zaltys thought it was a good idea-they might need to be able to dig down here.

“There,” Julen said, pointing. A tunnel, partially obscured by fallen rocks, led off from one end of the cavern-the end that led back toward the caravan site. “I wonder if we’ll end up underneath our own campsite?” he said.

“We’ll see,” she said, and led the way, holding her sunrod aloft. They moved a few rocks aside, widening the opening, but once they stepped into the tunnel, it wasn’t as claustrophobic as Zaltys had expected. “Looks like an old mine shaft,” she said, pointing out the squared-off shape of the passage.

“Should have brought one of the dwarf craftsmen from the camp. They know about mines.”

“I don’t think there’s much to know, except: a long time ago there was a mine. This passage was used for something else more recently, though. A passageway for slavers, coming up from wherever. Is there, I don’t know, a derro city?” The notion seemed outrageous. They were in a hole in the ground.

“There are cities down here, supposedly, but a lot deeper than this,” Julen said doubtfully. “The Underdark isn’t mapped-some say it can’t be mapped, that tunnels are constantly collapsing and new tunnels being formed by purple worms and umber hulks and intelligent creatures excavating passages. But there are three, sort of, regions. The Upperdark is the part of the Underdark you can reach from the surface world, or from mineshafts and basements. And while there are monsters there, the drow and derro and other people-if you can call them people-who live down here don’t like to settle so close to the surface. They come up sometimes to escape danger, or to, ah, forage.”

“Or take slaves,” Zaltys said.

“Yes. But their settlements are in the Middledark. Below that is the Lowerdark, and the books I read didn’t say much about that, apart from the fact that it’s deep, and big, and full of terrible things. As for derro cities, I’m sure they have settlements, but I’m not sure about cities.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re mad. Rainer said so, and the books agree. Can an insane race build cities? Keep a city alive? It seems impossible.”

“Mad, huh? Then they won’t put up an organized defense, although they must have organized a little if they do slave raids. What else do you know about them, since we’ll be fighting them soon, like as not?”

“I wasn’t researching them in particular,” Julen admitted. “But, let’s see … Some say they’re the offspring of men and dwarves. Others say they’re a race of their own that became terribly degenerate and offended the gods, only to be cast down into the Underdark for their transgressions-whatever those were. Some of them worship aberrations. Things that came here from some other place. You’ve heard of the Far Realm?”

“Some plane or another, right?” Zaltys had never paid much attention to the tutors when they started going on about the other planes of existence. Why should she care about anything like that, when her tutors knew less about the interior of the jungle than Zaltys did herself? If they were so ignorant of their world, how could they know anything about worlds entirely distant?

“Ye-es.” Julen sounded doubtful. “I guess so. But it’s a realm of monsters beyond ordinary monsters, creatures that claw and tear at reality itself. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds bad. Sometimes creatures from that world make it to this world, and terrible things happen. Supposedly the Underdark is more full of such creatures than most, and even though the derro are despised by all the other intelligent races down here-drow, duergar, everyone-they sometimes ally themselves with creatures from the Far Realm. Like aboleths. Such aberrations tend to live way down deep, though-or else we’d see their influence on the surface world more.”

“You think we’ll have to go that deep?” Zaltys hadn’t really thought that far ahead. She’d thought, if Rainer made it back to the surface, the slaves couldn’t be that far away, but Julen said the old guard had wandered for years in the darkness, so who could say? “I can track anything,” she said, peering at the tunnel as they walked onward and-increasingly-downward. “But there’s just nothing to track. I don’t think anyone’s come through here in years. There’s no sign of-”

“Life,” Julen said weakly.

They’d reached the end of the tunnel, and discovered another room, that one a hub of sorts with mineshafts branching off in half-a-dozen different directions. A small wooden table sat in the center of the room, scattered with bits of bone and shards of metal beside a neatly coiled black whip. They entered cautiously, looking around. “Someone has been here, much more recently,” she said, noting a few wooden bowls crusted with old-but not ancient-food.

“The mines,” Julen said. “I don’t know who built them, if they’re a remnant of one of the old jungle empires or something built by dwarves or duergar, but the derro are using them as shortcuts to the surface. The mineshaft that opens close to the terazul fields was sealed with rubble, so they stopped using it, but these tunnels must lead to other places, all over the jungle. I bet Rainer made his way up here, and went down one of these. They could go for miles, but they must reach the air and light eventually.”

“So how do the derro get here?” She looked around the cavern, and found, under a pile of old rags, the edge of a metal trapdoor. Zaltys stared at it, thinking of the trapdoor over the anathema’s pit, until Julen noticed her.

“Guess that’s our door to the deep. Or the middle, anyway. We might be able to track the slavers this way, don’t you think? Surely a big crowd of derro crashing through leaves traces you can follow?”

“We’ll see.” Zaltys lifted open the heavy trapdoor with a shriek of hinges that echoed hugely in the enclosed space. A wooden ladder extended down into the depths.

“Me first,” Julen said cheerfully, and began descending, swallowed in moments by the dark, which seemed almost as thick and substantial as syrup. Zaltys went after him, pausing briefly, then grasped the ring on the underside of the trapdoor and closed it after her. Better to leave no trace of their passage if they could avoid it, as there might be derro about. Allowing themselves to be captured might be the fastest way to find out where the slaves were held, but it would almost certainly inhibit their ability to free the other slaves once they arrived.

The ladder went down for a long time, and the sunrod was awkward to hold while climbing, and only illuminated the walls of a narrow shaft, so Zaltys finally said, “Look out below, I’m going to drop the light.”

Julen grunted his assent, and Zaltys twisted around on the ladder and tossed the sunrod past him. They both looked down as the light moved, revealing that they were barely halfway down the ladder, and illuminating branching side tunnels dotting the shaft. They gave Zaltys a shudder. Anything could be inside them. The sunrod finally clattered to the stones below, its magical light undimmed by impact, but it didn’t reveal much: enclosed space, and, presumably, tunnels leading away. Still, it provided a glow for them to move toward, and that was something. Zaltys was already starting to think of light as a precious resource. The sunrod would burn for only another four or five hours, and she only had three more in her pack-she hadn’t imagined that she would need more than a day’s worth of light, but that had been based on the notion that it was just some small local system of caverns and tunnels. After what Julen had told her, and what she’d observed for herself so far, she suspected the Underdark was far vaster than she could comprehend.

And dangerous too. But the jungle was dangerous, and Zaltys thrived there. What terrors could the dark hold to rival the vine horrors and monstrous spiders and immense serpents and lunatic apes she’d fought and bested in the world above?

They reached the bottom of the ladder, Julen waiting impatiently for her to come after him. He picked up the sunrod and stepped forward, Zaltys following, down a short corridor that dead-ended at a low-ceilinged, rounded corridor that seemed more burrowed than hewn and stretched off in both directions. “Which way?”

Zaltys kneeled, examining the rock in both directions, finally saying, “This way seems more traveled. Do you see the scuffmarks of-”

“That’s fine, I don’t need to know the dugeoneering theory behind it,” Julen said. “I have faith in you.” He went down the right-hand corridor, still holding the light, and Zaltys followed. They both ducked their heads, because even though the roof of the tunnel was taller than they were, it wasn’t much taller, and there was a sense of immense pressure and weight all around them. The weight of the whole world above.

“You know,” Julen said, “this is a lot less terrible than I expected. The accounts I read talked about grell and carrion crawlers and gelatinous cubes and rust monsters inhabiting the Upperdark, but I guess the derro have scared away everything but themselves. Maybe this won’t be so-”

And then he yelped and disappeared through a hole in the floor. Zaltys gasped as the light he held vanished with him, dropping to her knees and feeling her way forward with her hands until she found the edge of the pit and the shreds of black cloth that had been used to conceal it. A trap, doubtless meant for exactly the sort of interlopers they were. She peered down into the hole, which was about ten feet deep. Julen groaned, sitting up and rubbing his head, the dropped sunrod casting harsh shadows across him.

“Hold on, I’ll lower a rope,” she said, but while she turned her face away to dig in her pack, Julen cried out.

She looked back down the hole, and saw a small, lithe figure dressed in black kneeling on Julen’s back. The creature, no bigger than a child, had wild hair sticking up in filthy tufts, and giggled to itself in an incessant, almost monotonous way. Julen arched his back, wriggled like an eel, and struck out with a knife, filling one of the monster’s eyes with a steel blade. He wrenched the knife free and started to stand up, but then something buzzed through the air. Zaltys could see a short dart sticking out of Julen’s neck, and he put his hand to the wound before swaying and falling back against the rocks. Some kind of poison, or if he was lucky, just a tranquilizer to knock him unconscious.

Zaltys almost leaped down, but three more of the creatures surged into the hole and began binding Julen’s limbs with metal chains. If they hit her with a dart too, they’d both be doomed-better to wait for an opportunity to free him. She started to move back, and her boot scraped on the stone. The creatures at the bottom of the pit froze and whipped their heads back, staring straight up.

The things were nightmares, like parodies of humans: skin a blue-tinged gray, eyes far too large for the small faces and lacking either pupil or iris, giving them a look of blindness-but Zaltys knew they could see all too well, and must almost certainly be able to see in the dark. She had to hope the brightness of the sunrod at the bottom of the pit diminished their vision, or else they would surely see her.

But she could hide in shadows now. She let herself fade into the dimness, using the shadow snake’s power of concealment, and after a moment the derro giggled again and turned their attention back to Julen. One of them grasped the chains binding Julen’s wrists and dragged his unconscious body out of sight. Zaltys would wait a few moments, then drop down and follow them from concealment, choosing the moment to step through a shadow and attack them.

The tunnel floor shuddered, and the pit filled with rubble, smothering the light from the abandoned sunrod and blocking her access. Rocks had obviously been stacked and braced, and when the derro left, they’d removed the braces, collapsing the pit. They might be insane giggling monsters, but they were smart enough to cover their tracks in case Julen did have companions. She cursed, and thought furiously. Saving Julen was the first priority, obviously. But if she could track him and his captors, the derro might lead her to the place where slaves were kept. Still, what if she were captured herself? She wouldn’t be able to bear it if Julen died or suffered-worse than he’d already suffered-because of her. For his sake, she would be willing to ask Krailash for help, but if she returned the surface, she might lose track of him forever.

The ring. She looked down at her hand, and the gently pulsing crystalline ring there. She thought, as hard as she could, to Krailash: Julen has been captured by derro in the tunnels beneath my family’s false grave. The ring’s light pulsed brighter, and then went dim. That was the last message she’d be able to send for a day or so. She’d have to hope it was received, and that Krailash could send help.

She couldn’t quite bring herself to hope that she wouldn’t need help. Not realistically.

Zaltys probed her way on hands and knees along the dark tunnel until her hand encountered another cloth-covered pit trap. Using her hunting knife, she slit the cloth open. Once she’d made a hole, she took a climbing spike from her pack and worked it into a crack in the floor. She tied a rope around the spike, dropped it into the hole, then lowered herself carefully into the pit. Even fully extended, her fingertips clinging to the edge of the pit, she couldn’t feel the bottom-which made sense. The other had been easily ten feet deep. She grasped the rope and lowered herself, inch by inch, into the total darkness below (not so different from the total darkness above), hoping there would be no spikes or other hazards waiting for her. She planted her feet on solid ground and listened. There was giggling, faintly, off to her left. With a jerk on the rope she freed the climbing spike and bundled both into her pack, then felt her way along the tunnel that led out of the pit, following the sound of insane laughter.

She could already understand how madness could be a consequence of spending time down there.