by Tim Pratt
Not that he much liked what he saw. The two derro dragging him along were remarkably boring captors—they’d even stopped singing. They’d paused once, in what Julen sensed was a dark immense cavern, and barked harsh phrases into the air, to no response that Julen could discern. Perhaps they’d been negotiating with some crawling horror, or just reassuring sentries that they were friend not foe. From there they’d moved into gradually better-lit passages, and he’d determined that they were shorter than himself, and thinner, wearing filthy and scuffed leather armor, armed with chain whips, and with dirty white shocks of hair. He couldn’t speak to their facial features because they hadn’t once turned to look at him. That was good, since he was still leaving chalk marks for Zaltys to follow, but it was hard not to feel like a sentient sack of potatoes. Julen was considering—not seriously, but just as a thought experiment—trying to escape, just to make something happen, when the two derro stopped at a place where two tunnels branched off in separate directions.
This particular bit of cavern, a chamber the size of Alaia’s wagon, was aswarm with those greenish glowing bugs, and Julen’s body crushed the ones that didn’t scurry away fast enough as he was dragged along. When their bodies burst, the smell was foul, and he would have gagged, but that would have meant opening his mouth, and the possibility of one of these insects crawling over his tongue was too horrific to contemplate.
One of the derro crouched, grabbed one of the bugs, and took a bite out of it as if chomping into an apple. He chewed, flat long face almost thoughtful, as green fluid ran down into his filthy beard. After a moment he gestured, negligiently, toward the leftmost of the two tunnels that opened off the bug-filled space.
“Too slow,” the other derro said, in perfectly comprehensible Common. “Other way’s faster.”
The bug-eater responded in the thudding, sonorous tones that Julen assumed were Deep Speech, and gestured more forcefully.
His companion sneered. “Don’t care. I’m not afraid. I’m hungry.”
Bug-eater offered his handful of leaking, still-twitching insect, and the argumentative derro slapped it away. “I want meat that screams. Meat that can ask me not to eat it.”
The bug-eater gestured to Julen, who had never imagined that such a casual wave of the hand could make his bowels clench and his muscles tense and the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
“Nah. Young, strong, better for other things. Slime King wouldn’t like it if we ate him.”
Bug-eater shrugged, pointed to the leftmost tunnel, and said something else in Deep Speech.
“Fine, but I’ll get there faster, and I’ll have the slave, and you’ll just have bug juice on your face, ha!”
That argument did not dissuade Bug-eater, who headed into the tunnel and vanished from sight. The last derro grunted and pulled on Julen’s chain, dragging him, seemingly effortlessly, toward the other tunnel—which was, fortunately, almost entirely insect-free.
Just one of them now, Julen thought. Could he take just one of them? Yes, he was bound, but he was also Guardian trained, and there were things a man could do even trussed up like a pig for a holiday dinner—not many things, admittedly, and none of them obviously useful in his situation, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. As they passed into the darkness of the new, narrow tunnel, Julen decided to try talking first, perhaps lull his captor into a sense of security, maybe even get his bonds loosened. “If you untied these chains a little, I could walk, and you wouldn’t have to pull me.”
The derro didn’t answer.
“Look, I know you can understand me, I heard you talking. Your accent is atrocious, but we can communicate. Why not talk with me?”
“Speaking meat is my favorite meat,” the derro said, but as if musing aloud, not talking to Julen at all. “Sometimes it talks even while you’re eating it, if you start eating it at the right place.” The derro was almost shouting, because the sound of running water, a distant constant background noise until then, had grown closer and louder.
Julen raised his voice too. “Look, then, just to pass the time, just a conversation, what can that hurt? Tell me, why didn’t your friend want to go this way? And why did you kill the other one, the one who was talking about labyrinths?”
“But eventually it stops speaking and it just becomes meat and sometimes that’s better. Sometimes I don’t like to hear anyone talking but me, because nobody else says anything worth hearing, no one else says anything any better than what meat says.” The derro gave an especially vicious jerk of the chain. “Down we go, chattering meat. Watch yourself. This is the fast way.”
The derro hurled Julen into a fast-rushing channel of icy water that thundered inexorably down. The shock of cold, and the desperate attempt to roll over to get his face out of the water and save himself from drowning, drove all thought from Julen’s head. The derro jumped in after him, still gripping the chain, and they rode the slick, narrow channel of water down through pure blackness. I can’t mark my passage, he thought, and indeed, the chalk had been dashed from his grasping fingers when the derro flung him into the water. No one will ever find me, and I’ll never find my way out.
On the plus side, the luminescent bug guts staining his leathers were washed away.
The derro above him giggled wildly, clearly delighting in the ride. After what seemed an eternity of spitting water and gasping for breath and trying to force his chained, contorted body to obey his instructions, things got even worse. Julen went airborne, flying into empty space. The presence of faint light from glowing red crystals on the new cavern walls gave him no comfort, because as he spun in empty air, the illumination allowed him to see what waited below: a vast pool of water, tinted the hue of blood by the crystals’ light.
Julen was a decent swimmer. But not when his ankles were bound to his wrists. He crashed down into the pool of subterranean water. Near-freezing wet blackness closed over him.
Then he began to drown.
Krailash reached behind him and grabbed the derro, plucking it from his back as effortlessly as he would pick a tick from a dog’s coat. The creature was a flailing, biting, snapping thing, but derro were small, so Krailash tore it loose and hurled it at the nearest of the descending shapes to emerge from the darkness overhead. The derro squawked as it struck the swordwing, but it was the last sound the slaver would ever make: the buzzing, man-sized flying monster sliced the derro apart with deft slashes of its chitinous, wickedly serrated limbs. Their heads were insectlike, eyes bulging and expressionless, and their mouthparts were complex and endlessly moving.
“Fall back!” Krailash shouted, and his men—terrified though they must have been at such alien horrors—formed a defensive wall of steel protecting Alaia and the path to the cavern entrance. The dragonborn rushed to Alaia’s side and said, “We’re all dead, unless you have a trick to get us out of this.”
“Keep me alive long enough to come up with something,” the shaman said levelly.
“Better if you just escape,” Krailash said, “while we fight them off. I can’t promise to hold them long.”
And then the swordwings were upon them. Krailash let himself fall into the battle state: he was no longer a thinking creature with a conscious mind, or hopes, or dreams. He was a machine that identified threats and killed them. Krailash worked through the techniques his long-ago teacher, an unusually soft-spoken half-orc who could split a bull’s skull with a casual swing of his great two-handed sword, had taught him. The battle-axe sang in Krailash’s hands, and his muscles sang too, as he stepped through the most advanced forms of assault he knew. The fangs of steel: a lunge to bloody one enemy, followed by a spin to smash another from the air. The skullcrusher: an overhand blow to make an enemy stumble in a daze, reeling and easy to finish off. The exorcism of steel, used to sever a swordwing’s lethal arm at the elbow, rather than making a human opponent drop his sword. One swordwing swung at him from above and behind with a blow so hard it staggered him to his knees, but the monster’s barb
ed arm got stuck in Krailash’s armor, trapping it, and the dragonborn swung his axe back in a movement that would have embedded the blade in his own spine if the swordwing hadn’t been there to catch the edge first. He shook off the clinging enemy and stepped into the vorpal tornado form, whirling and spinning and striking any swordwing that entered his deadly storm of steel, spraying icy breath to freeze them and make them fall from the air as he fought.
After he’d killed half a dozen, the weapon in his hands began to hum, its old and unreliable enchantment coming to life. Krailash grinned. The axe’s magic only manifested when it was well soaked in blood—or, apparently, the black slime swordwings had in place of blood—but that was, after all, usually when Krailash needed it most. The axe was sometimes called Thunder’s Edge, and he swung it in a hard, flat arc in the direction of a group of hovering swordwings. The blade didn’t touch them—they were too far away—but a wave of concussive force flew from the axe and sent them tumbling through the air and smashing into their fellows.
Being in the heat of battle again after so long working as, essentially, an exterminator killing jungle vermin, was a thrill. But he knew death was inevitable. His men were dead or dying, Krailash himself was bleeding from dozens of cuts on his hands and head and tail—the portions not well protected by armor—and the swordwings kept coming, flickering through space in an unnatural way, as numerous as bees in a hive, and as indifferent to the death of their fellows. He would make them pay well for his death, but he could not deprive them of it. His only regret was that Alaia, Zaltys, and Julen—members of the family he was honor-sworn to protect—might not make it out of the horrible world underground.
Suddenly, the cavern filled with snakes: huge, coiling, spectral. Their bodies passed through Krailash, suffusing him with strange energies. Suddenly he could move with the speed of a striking snake, and he redoubled his efforts to drive back the swordwings—and after a few moments, his whirling axe found nothing to bite. The swordwings were occupied fighting the surging snakes that roiled all around. They might have been only spirits, but where their jaws closed, the swordwings were devoured or snapped in two, and there seemed as many snakes as enemies.
Krailash paused, dazed, and then Alaia touched his arm. “Come on!” she shouted, and rushed toward the place where they’d entered the cavern. He looked around for his men, but the snakes had appeared too late to help any of them, and all were lost—Cayley’s head nearly severed by a swordwing’s strike, Hemingwood facedown and unmoving surrounded by the limbs of enemies, Fallon transfixed by a spear jutting from a tower of junk, Morris’s upper body some feet away from his lower half. Krailash muttered a brief thanks, in case their spirits lingered, and then hurried after Alaia. The agility the spirits had given him was sufficient to allow him to sprint, quite a trick given the weight of his armor.
They made their way through the crack in the wall where the treacherous derro had led them away from the Causeway. “Stand back,” Krailash growled, facing the crack in the wall. Thunder’s Edge still hummed in his hands, and he swung, aiming its destructive force at the stone before them. The wall collapsed in a pile of black stones, sealing the entryway.
Krailash sagged to his knees, the spirit strength draining away, his injuries catching up with him. “Never seen anything like that before,” he murmured.
“I’d never done it before,” Alaia said, touching his arm. “Probably the second most powerful magic I know. My teacher called it the Sea of Serpents.” She shook her head. “I don’t much like snakes, even if they aren’t real snakes, exactly.”
“Those snakes saved your life,” Krailash said.
“Both of our lives,” she corrected.
“I’m not so sure,” the dragonborn said. He closed his eyes, sinking into a warm and enveloping inner blackness that no weapon he’d ever studied could combat.
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 inv
isible 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.