by Tim Pratt
“It’s possible,” Julen conceded. “But he sounded sane enough, once he calmed down, and one thing followed another in his story pretty clearly. We’ll probably never know.”
“No. I have to know. I need the truth,” she said.
Julen spread his hands. “How? If your mother and the others were lying to you, how can you trust anything they say if you confront them?”
She nodded. “You’re right. I can’t just ask. So I have to go look. I have to go find out if my original family is dead.”
“How do we do that? Investigate a crime almost two decades old?”
“It’s easy,” Zaltys said. “We do it with shovels.”
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 h
e 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.
ALAIA WASN’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.