Venom in Her Veins

by Tim Pratt

“At home, I’d be eating grapes and some of the good sheep cheese,” he said glumly, “and possibly reading a volume of poetry. Or at least skulking through a nice dry hallway somewhere. Here, I get to traipse through the damp woods after a snake.”

  “Yes,” Zaltys said. “You’re absolutely right. This is much more fun.”

  Zaltys knew she was something like a princess. The city of Delzimmer had no noble class, no king, no aristocrats. Instead, the upper echelons of society were populated by the successful merchants and traders, and no matter how mean your birth, you could ascend to the ranks of the most powerful by sheer sweat, treachery, and ingenuity.

  That was the theory, anyway. In practice, control of the city was held by several powerful merchant families. While the Serrats had not yet reached the pinnacle of power held by the ruling four families, their influence was growing every year. They’d risen to prominence following the great disaster that turned Delzimmer into a port city, taking advantage of the chaos following that upheaval to profit immensely. The Serrats had further enriched and entrenched themselves in the city’s society by becoming sole providers of terazul and the potent substances that could be made from the rare flower.

  Zaltys was the only heir of Alaia, one of the three most powerful members of the family. During the six months of the year when she lived in the city, there were servants and tutors and bodyguards and social functions and ceremonial duties and meetings about profit projections and strategic realignment and diversification that she had to attend no matter how boring and abstract she found the topics. She wore dresses, and charmed old men from the Traders, and studied languages—not for ease of communication, because there were spells that would let her converse with people of other tongues, but because language revealed things about the culture that spoke it, and understanding other cultures was imperative to the success of the family’s far-flung business. Zaltys didn’t mind those months in Delzimmer, living like a princess, escorted everywhere by personal guards, eating fine foods and sipping watered wine and lounging in the Serrat’s private gardens.

  But those months never felt entirely real to Zaltys. They felt like pretend: like the games she played with her nannies as a little girl, pretending to have formal dinners with her dolls, or making believe she was at a costume party, dressing in cast-offs from her mother’s wardrobe. The only time she felt entirely real was during the twice-yearly expeditions into the jungle, when the caravan took the workers to the few spots where the rare and precious terazul blossoms grew. For three months at a time, Zaltys stopped being a princess and became a ranger, armed with bow and knives instead of dessert spoons and pearl earrings, learning to live and love the wild, hunting for food and for pleasure and to protect the caravan from predators. She wanted to stay in the jungle always—despite the itch, and despite the dreams—because it was the only place she felt fully awake. She belonged there. She knew her mother felt the same way, though Alaia, being a shaman, had a somewhat different relationship with the natural world; no less reverent, but certainly less martial in focus. As a young girl, on her first trips with the caravan at age six or seven, Zaltys had pleaded with her mother to let them stay in the wild always. But, for various logistical and political reasons, it couldn’t be. Zaltys had come to understand these reasons as the years went by, although she never stopped resenting them.

  In the jungle, she didn’t feel even remotely like a princess. She felt like a wild queen.

  JULEN WAS NO MORE COMFORTABLE IN THE DEEP WOODS than a cloth merchant, and he swore softly every time a thorned vine brushed him, and complained about the heat and humidity, which grasped them like a damp and sweaty fist. But Zaltys noted that he set his feet with care, and moved more silently than any city boy should be expected to—certainly more silently than Krailash, who was crashing through the brush some yards away with his own guards in hope of flushing out the shadow snake.

  Such beasts were treacherous, and seemed not entirely natural. They could be enormous, twice the length of a man, serpents in shape but shadowy in substance, and they had the trick of traveling from one spot to another without crossing the intervening space. She’d never seen one up close, only glimpsing them twice in her past travels, and usually deeper in the jungle. Stories said they were remnants of some forgotten yuan-ti settlement, pets left behind when their masters died or moved on. Their venom was supposed to be unspeakably virulent—legend said that a limb bitten by a shadow snake would turn shadowy and insubstantial itself, not so much rotting away as gradually fading from reality—but Zaltys wasn’t overly worried about the possibility of a bite. She’d never been bitten by a snake, despite literally countless encounters with them, and anyway, the caravan had an ample supply of anti-venoms.

  She put her hand on Julen’s shoulder, making him pause. They crouched among the thick-limbed trees near a clearing, where the vine-encrusted head of an enormous statue crowded the trees aside. “There,” Zaltys whispered, pointing.

  Julen squinted. “I don’t see anything.”

  “It’s dim, but it’s there, just a coil of shadow in the shade of the statue.” The shadow snake was either hiding or waiting in ambush, as its kind preferred to attack from concealment. Zaltys could appreciate that. It was a tactic she favored herself.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Julen said.

  Zaltys reached back to her quiver, feeling the fletching of the arrows, looking for one in particular. Her mother and Quelamia had provided her with a few arrows that had special qualities. One was tipped with the tooth of a salamander; another had an arrowhead made from a crystalline shard of the Living Gate, whatever that was; a third was coated in the slime from a basilisk’s eyes. Her fingers found the one she was looking for: feathers stiff with cold, so chilled they almost burned her finger. She drew the arrow, its head a vicious triangle of pure ice, and nocked it in her bow.

  “You’re shooting at shadows,” Julen said, still squinting. Krailash and the other guards were crashing through, coming closer, and the shadow snake coiled itself, preparing to strike. With its ability to shift from place to place, it could bite everyone in the party before they had a moment to fight back. Unless Zaltys could stop it.

  She drew the arrow, looking beyond the length of the shaft at the grayish-black serpent, and loosed.

  The arrow left a trail of vapor in the air as it flew, and it struck the snake just below its jaw. The arrowhead shattered on impact, chips of magical ice striking the shadow serpent in the head and throat, and a web of cold and frost grew, pinning the snake to the statue. The serpent twisted wildly and flickered, becoming insubstantial in patches, but Quelamia’s magics wouldn’t permit it to phase out of solidity and escape, not without tearing its own throat out in the process.

  “Now I see it,” Julen said, stepping into the clearing after Zaltys. “Nice shooting, Cousin.”

  “Wait for it to die before you get too close,” she said, watching the snake writhe, body flapping like a banner in a high wind. “They’re lethal in their death throes.”

  Why do you kill me, child of Zehir? the shadow snake said, fixing her with its eerie twilit eyes.

  Zaltys stared. “What—did you …?”

  Julen looked at her oddly. “Did I what?”

  “I thought I heard …” But she hadn’t heard it, exactly. The snake’s voice had spoken in her head, the way Glory could when she pushed her thoughts into Zaltys’s mind—generally because the psion was too lazy to walk across the camp to speak to Zaltys in person.

  You killed one of my friends, Zaltys thought, though it wasn’t quite true—she didn’t even know the name of the guard who’d died, and Krailash would have mentioned if it was someone she knew. But the dead guard was someone who worked for the family, which meant she had a responsibility to him.

  But we are death from the darkness, the shadow snake said. Its writhing slowed, and though there was no light to fade from its eyes, the darkness in its eyes became less malevolent and more merely empty. We are poison and su
rprise. We are children of …

  The snake died, and seemed less eerie and dangerous in death, becoming merely a giant snake with grayish-black scales. Julen was poking at the serpent with the blade of his knife, opening its jaws to look at the fangs within, and Zaltys had to bite back the urge to tell him to stop, that it wasn’t respectful to prod the dead, but of course, it was just a beast, though possibly a magical one. Had Zaltys imagined the voice in her head? The things the serpent said, they weren’t so dissimilar from the things she sometimes heard in her dreams.

  Krailash appeared with his guards then. “Ah, you beat us to the kill,” he said. “I suspected you would.” He nodded to Julen. “Are you skilled with a knife, young man?”

  Julen flipped the blade up into the air and caught it by the hilt in his other hand without looking. “What do you think?”

  “I think juggling isn’t the same as cutting,” the dragonborn said dryly. “But if you’ve any skill as an anatomist, feel free to cut out the eyes and fangs of the beast there, and skin it too. The wizard in our caravan can use the components of a shadow beast in her rituals, I’m sure. Leave the meat, though. I wouldn’t want shadowflesh in a cookpot. No telling what sort of indigestion that might give you.”

  Zaltys again resisted the urge to object. Why should cutting up a shadow serpent strike her as a desecration?

  Julen sighed. “Butchery isn’t as fun as other things, but my father made me dissect all sorts of things so I’d know the best place to strike with a blade, so I’m sure I can manage this.”

  “Good. Zaltys, you’ll keep him company?” And keep watch over him, was the unspoken portion, or so Zaltys assumed.

  “Yes, Krai.”

  “Excellent. See you both back at camp. Don’t linger—the parts will spoil if we don’t get them to Quelamia soon.”

  Zaltys sat on the statue’s jutting snout and watched as Julen deftly cut into the serpent’s head, levering out its eyes. He dropped the orbs into a leather pouch and set that aside. The ice from her arrow was already melting, and the shaft fell to the ground, where Julen kicked it aside. “Don’t do that,” she said, letting some of her confusion emerge in the form of annoyance. “We don’t have an infinite supply of arrows out here.”

  “Right, sorry.” Julen was intent on his work, pulling the serpent’s body free of the ice and stretching it out to its full length on the ground. “Didn’t think about it. It’s so strange, this creature doesn’t even bleed. Means I won’t need to change my shirt, at least, which is good, since I only brought three others, and you’ve reminded me that I can’t just send my valet out to get more … barbaric.” He sawed off the snake’s head—Zaltys had to look away—then crouched and sliced neatly along the center of the snake’s belly from the base of the headless stump to the cloaca. He put the knife aside, grasped the snake’s skin in both hands, and pulled with gentle, even pressure, peeling its skin back in a single piece. Once the skin was pulled almost entirely free of the flesh underneath, he used the knife to cut through the last clinging shreds of fat and muscle, and held up the shadow snake’s skin. It was a large, single sheet of snakeskin, and it fluttered oddly, seeming to absorb light and fuzzily emit darkness. “Hate to roll this up, but I don’t see how we can carry it loose. Give me a hand?”

  Zaltys nodded, trying not to let her reluctance show, and helped Julen roll up the snakeskin into a bundle small enough to carry. Once he had it in his arms, and the pouch of eyes and teeth at his belt, he said, “Okay. Keep me from getting eaten by tigers, because I don’t have a free hand.”

  She led him back to camp, though she could hear the guards Krailash had left behind moving on either side in tandem with them. Zaltys and Julen had never been out of sight of their protectors, probably, but Krailash had shown an unusual level of discretion, for him, by leaving them hidden. Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass Zaltys in front of her cousin. Zaltys knew she didn’t need baby-sitters, and Krailash had assured her often that he had full faith in her ability to take care of herself in the jungle—indeed, she’d taught some his men the ways of the wild over the years—but she was a principal heir of the Serrat family; Krailash wasn’t about to take chances with her safety. It chafed, but the one time she’d used her superior skills to give his guards the slip and go roaming the jungle on her own, Krailash had been so beside himself with worry that she’d felt more guilty than pleased with herself, and since then she’d limited herself to merely complaining.

  Back in camp, dusk was falling, and it was nearly time for the first evening meal shift. Zaltys led Julen to Quelamia’s wagon and knocked on the trunk.

  A tiny knothole opened into a round door, and the eladrin looked out. “Yes?”

  “We brought you dead animal parts,” Julen said.

  “How … thoughtful.”

  “Skin of a shadow snake,” Zaltys said. “And some other bits. Krailash said you could use them?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, plucking the skin and the pouch from Julen’s hands. “I’m engaged in a little project, at your mother’s behest, Zaltys. I think you’ll enjoy the results.” Without another word, she sealed up the trunk of her tree.

  Zaltys and Julen exchanged shrugs. “You never got that food,” she said. “Want to come eat with me? I usually have my meal with the guardsmen.”

  “You eat with the servants?” Julen frowned. “Why?”

  “Would you rather talk about timetables and schedules and harvesting quotas with my mother, or about dice and fighting and war stories with the guards?”

  “The latter, certainly, but—they include you in their conversation? The times I’ve been alone with servants, they barely say anything, except for my guard of the bedchamber, and that’s different.”

  “We’re a bit more informal in the Travelers,” she said. “Everyone here depends on everyone else to keep them alive. It’s a dangerous business, going out in the field. If you don’t act like a little lordling, they won’t treat you like one.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Julen said, and they started toward the mess tent.

  Krailash met them, and held up his hand. “No,” he said. “Your mother wants you to dine with her, Quelamia, and …” he frowned. “There was someone else.”

  “Glory,” Zaltys prompted, and Krailash’s expression cleared.

  “Yes. Her. A table will be set up by your mother’s wagon.”

  “Am I being punished for something?” Zaltys said.

  “I think she just wants the family and the most loyal retainers to dine together,” Krailash said. “She wanted me there too, but I said it was better for morale if I ate with my men.” He winked at her—a gesture he’d picked up during his time among humans, though he used it rarely, being a serious person by nature—and said, “You’ll be dining in an hour or so.”

  She sighed. “All right. Can I leave Julen with you for a little while?”

  “Why?” Krailash said.

  “I left my ice arrow in the jungle. Stupid, I know, but my cousin here distracted me. I’d like to go retrieve it.”

  “I’ll detail a few guards—”

  Zaltys rolled her eyes. “It’s barely ten minutes away, and that’s if I creep along slowly. The scouts didn’t find anything threatening besides the shadow snake, and it’s dead. We’re barely in the jungle yet—I think I can make it that far safely. All right?”

  Krailash considered. “All right. This time. But come straight back.”

  “Yes, yes.” Zaltys told Julen she’d see him at dinner, then set off toward the jungle. She took a brief side trip to snatch one of the folding shovels the laborers used to dig latrine pits, then went into the trees.

  She found the clearing easily, following the marks left by her own trail—Julen hadn’t left any more sign than she had, amazingly, he was skilled at stealth—until she reached the statue’s severed head. The serpent’s body was still there, untouched as yet by predators. Zaltys began digging a hole near the statue, easily turning up spades full of the yielding, damp e
arth, until she had a small pit a few feet deep. She placed the shadow snake’s body in the hole, and put its eyeless head on top. Then she refilled the hole and piled some of the smaller chunks of statue rubble over the grave, disturbing countless colonies of fat, trundling beetles in the process. She kneeled for a moment by the grave, unsure why she’d felt compelled to bury it, unsure what she should say. “I’m sorry you had to die,” she said finally, and stood up, turning back toward her camp.

  While she’d been intent on filling the grave, the clearing had filled with snakes. Mundane ones, not flame spitters or shadow snakes or coil constrictors, just brightly-colored jungle serpents, all lifting their heads in the air and looking at her, swaying slightly. Zaltys started to take a step back, but she sensed, somehow, that they meant her no harm. Were they capable of telling that she’d done a kindness for their larger, more shadowy relative? Or annoyed at the way she’d casually killed one of their own with an arrow earlier? Either seemed possible, though neither was likely. As she moved forward, they slithered aside, clearing a path for her, and Zaltys backed into the trees, watching the serpents as they, in turn, watched her.

  Once she’d put a few trees between herself and the clearing, she turned and raced back to camp.

  ALONG TABLE HAD BEEN BROUGHT IN FROM SOMEWHERE—or possibly constructed rapidly by the carpenters and wheelwrights who traveled with the caravan—and covered with a rich pale blue cloth. Actual glass and porcelain dishes had been set out, in place of the usual wood and stoneware, and there was even a cut-glass vase filled with fresh jungle flowers in the table’s center. Only the seating betrayed the essential roughness of the enterprise, being a motley assortment of folding stools and camp chairs. When Zaltys arrived, having changed out of her hunting leathers into something less formal than her city garb but, at least, not actually blood- and sap-stained, Alaia sat at the head of the table dressed in mist-colored robes with a jeweled diadem on her brow, with Julen at her left. He wore a black formal dining suit that Zaltys couldn’t believe he’d bothered to pack. Quelamia sat farther down the table, and wore robes that seemed woven from waterfalls and sunlight and green leaves. Glory sat slouched across from her.