by Tim Pratt
Zaltys was sufficiently energized by her successful massacre of the floating jellyfish monsters that she almost wanted to shout for the derro to come out and face her, thinking she could pretty easily put them down too, but good sense won out over suicidal self-confidence. She didn’t worry about the light of her sunrod, assuming that, by that point, she’d fallen so far behind Julen’s captors that there was little chance of running into them, and reluctant to plunge herself into darkness again. Light was hard to give up once she had it. She soon realized the sunrod wasn’t strictly necessary, though. Even beyond the reach of her light she could see patches of illumination as she wound through tunnels with her snake companion.
She’d heard stories of rangers who formed close bonds with animals—actual animals, not the spectral pig her mother could summon—but she’d never expected to pick up a pet against her will. Perhaps the snake just thought following her was a good survival strategy. Any predator they encountered would probably focus on Zaltys first, both because she was more obviously a threat and because her body would provide a lot more sustenance when eaten.
Zaltys eventually reached a cavern crawling with hideous fist-sized insects with green, glowing bodies. What could they possibly be feeding on? Probably better if she didn’t know. She kicked a few out of her way, and noticed the smushed remains of several bodies. Good. Even without chalk marks, it was clear someone had passed that way recently, probably being dragged. There were two tunnels leaving from the room, one heading left, one right. She peered into the dimness, and didn’t see much to choose between them. The drag-path through the crushed bodies looked like it bore right, but it was hard to say—at least two other humanoids had tromped around the fork in the path, killing their own bugs, and the surviving insects were rapidly trundling away with the bodies of their fallen, presumably for a nice snack rather than a proper burial, which further obscured the signs of passage.
She chose right, for no particular reason other than intuition, but didn’t have to go far to have her intuition proved wrong. The roar of water rose, and the light from her sunrod revealed that the tunnel narrowed and merged with a rushing stream of water—very nearly a river—which disappeared down a long slope and wound out of sight. Hard to imagine slavers going that way, even if they were mad.
She retraced her steps, the snake unperturbed by the change in direction, and went down the other tunnel. That one was rather twistier and more circuitous, no bigger than the narrow hallways in the servants’ quarters of the family villa back home, and though the slope was never terribly steep, she was certainly descending ever downward. There were no more chalk marks, which was worrisome. She rounded a curve and found a derro bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, vomiting noisily. The puddle on the floor had chunks of glowing green bug parts in it, and when he looked up at her, the derro’s white beard was streaked with luminous juices. His eyes, permanently wide anyway, widened farther. Zaltys was too close even to fire the hand crossbow, so she stepped forward, spun on the ball of her foot, and smashed him in the face with her elbow. The derro’s head snapped back and bashed against the stone wall, leaving him dazed long enough for Zaltys to sweep his feet out from under him. After he hit the floor, she snatched the iron shackles from his belt and snapped them onto his wrists, where they magically tightened.
But she had a problem. She could kill him, but something in her balked at murdering a humanoid that was unconscious and chained—the jellyfish-things might have had a rich culture and vast intellects, but they looked sufficiently inhuman that she hadn’t hesitated to slay them. The derro, on the other hand, looked almost like a child, and even knowing he was a sadistic cruel slave-taker who’d stolen her original family couldn’t sufficiently steel her to put a dagger in his eye. She could try to wake him up and force him to tell her where his people lived, as she’d originally planned, but knowing how mad the creatures were, how could she trust anything he said? If she just left him there, though, one of his brethren would surely discover him eventually and raise the alarm, and since she was in the caverns of the derro, they’d surely find her no matter how skilled she was at melting into shadow.
Better to stash him out of sight somewhere, so if he woke up, no one would find him for a while. Surely there was a useful dark hole she could stuff him into, even though he hadn’t seen any branch paths at all along the winding tunnel. Continuing forward was dangerous—what if he’d been part of a larger group that had moved on when he felt the need to empty his guts of bug meat? They might be back soon.
She sighed. She could think of one place to take him. After disarming the derro—and burdening herself with his weapons, so they wouldn’t be found littering the tunnel—she bound his bootlaces together to make a handle, and started dragging him by the feet behind her, back the way she’d come. The weight of the two packs she was carrying was bad enough, but she also had to drag someone who, though small, didn’t weigh that much less than she did. All those hours roaming the jungles were time well spent, and she was up to the physical task, but it was exhausting.
Looking back once, she saw the albino snake had climbed onto the derro’s chest and lay coiled there, apparently asleep. There was something profoundly odd about that animal.
Finally she made it back to the cavern of bugs, and hauled the derro toward the right-hand tunnel. There was no reason any derro would venture into a dead-end that led to an icy waterfall, so it was probably a safe place to stash him. As the noise of roaring water grew, the derro jerked and twisted in her grip, and she dropped his legs, whirling to face him. He shouted something guttural, and though Zaltys couldn’t understand the language, she understood the tone—terror. “What?” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you.”
“Not down there,” the derro gasped as the snake slithered off his chest. “No … throw water.”
Zaltys frowned. “Why on earth would I throw you into the …”
Her eyes fell on something glowing faintly blue in the shadows. She hadn’t noticed it before. At first she thought it was more of that damnable glowing fungus, but it wasn’t. It was a stub of chalk—the chalk Julen had used to mark his passage. Zaltys looked at the rushing waterfall. “Did you throw my cousin down there?” Her voice was level and steady, and so was her hand when she drew the repeating crossbow and pointed it at the derro’s face. “Did you?”
“No, no me. Other me. Water faster. But not safer.”
“You mean another derro took Julen? You travel this way?”
“Fast way. Fast way down.” The derro gabbled something in his own tongue, which didn’t prove illuminating, but Zaltys understood enough. She considered putting a bolt through one of the creature’s wide white eyes—the terrible cold fury and howling emptiness she’d felt when she thought the derro had drowned Julen for sport still lingered. But she lowered the crossbow. She would kill derro in the tunnels, she was sure, but she didn’t have to start with him.
Zaltys took a moment to strap her packs together more firmly, verify that her bow case was well sealed, and make sure everything that shouldn’t get wet was wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Back in Delzimmer, there was a grassy hill behind the main villa, with a steep slope covered in long grasses, and some of the Serrat children would take mats of woven reeds out and use them to sled down the hill, laughing as they reached tremendous speeds. Zaltys had always found that fun. Maybe the river would be fun too. Except wetter, and colder, and descending into unknown depths, and then there was the matter of the bug-eating derro saying that way was “not safer.”
Safety was fairly low on her list of concerns, though.
With a last check that her equipment was secure, Zaltys climbed down onto a stone outcroppping and lowered herself beside the water, just where it came rushing out of a crack in the rock. She reached down, putting her hand in the water—cold!—and feeling the stone beneath, which was at least worn refreshingly smooth. Tearing herself open on a sharp outcropping would be no fun at all. Holding her packs in fr
ont of her, with the straps tied around her chest, and the sunrod clutched in one hand, she slipped into the water. That part of the slope was almost flat, which meant she’d have to launch herself forward deliberately.
She took a breath, hoped there’d be a soft landing at the end, and scooted forward, consigning herself to gravity. At least she’d finally be rid of that unusually clingy snake.
Just before she was well out of earshot, the derro shouted something. She wasn’t entirely sure the word was in her language, and it didn’t seem to mean anything in particular, but it rang in her head as she rode the river down deeper into the dark.
The word had sounded like “fishmeat.”
THE TRIO OF KUO-TOA CAME CRAWLING OUT OF THE pool, hauling their repulsive, shimmering bodies onto the stone floor of the cavern. Yes, Julen thought, I’ve eaten my last seafood dinner. Nothing but meat and greens and fruit for me from now on, and the livelihood of the hardworking fishermen of Delzimmer be damned. The Kuo-toa seemed more curious about him than openly aggressive, though who could say for sure? They had the heads of fish. Their expressions were the very definition of inscrutable. Still, the best-case scenario was they’d ignore him and leave him to starve to death. It seemed far more likely they’d murder him outright, or try to enslave him, though how would they drag him through their underwater tunnels without him dying in the process? Presumably they had some magic to address the problem.
Pondering such things helped him keep the paralying fear at bay, more or less, though what did it matter if he were paralyzed? He was chained, which was almost worse.
Someone came hurtling over the waterfall and landed in the pool with a titanic splash. Could it be Bug-eater, having changed his mind about taking the scenic route, come to rescue Julen from slavery in order to press him into another flavor of slavery? From his angle on the cavern floor, next to the bloodstain that was the only thing left of his dream-interpreting captor, he couldn’t see much at all to prove his hypothesis. The kuo-toa all turned, though, not so much whirling on the balls of their finned feet as dragging their bodies around in a half-circle to face the pool. They were obviously amphibious, but their bodies were clearly made more for moving underwater. They’d probably be graceful swimming around under the surface of some horrid lightless sea, but on land they moved like fish with legs, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Someone came gasping to the surface of the water and started splashing toward the edge of the pool, and Julen couldn’t help but feel envy. He could have made a decent showing when he fell in the water too, if he’d been unbound. The kuo-toa grunted and squealed and raised their weapons, and the person dragging themselves up out of the water looked up, and saw them, and looked past them, and saw Julen.
It was Zaltys. She was dirty, even after her dunk in the river, and so loaded with supplies that she looked like a human pack mule, and her hair was wet and plastered to her face, and her eyes were wide and, if they weren’t terrified, it was only because they hadn’t yet finished looking surprised.
She’d never looked more beautiful to him, not even in his dreams. The kuo-toa hurled harpoons at her, and she promptly vanished. A nice trick, doubtless courtesy of her fancy new armor. The harpoons splashed harmlessly in the water, and as the kuo-toa reeled them back, peering into the depths to see where their prey had gone, they started to sprout arrows from the backs of their heads. Julen looked up, and Zaltys was standing over him, having emerged from the shadows of the cavern, dropped both her packs at her feet, and drawn her weapon. Her bow seemed no more substantial to his eye than a twist of black smoke against a twilight sky, but the arrows looked precisely like what they were—spinning shafts of death.
The kuo-toa thrashed, exactly like fish caught and tossed to the floor of a boat, gradually going still. They didn’t stink like dead fish, yet, but Julen assumed it was only a matter of time. “Nice to see you, Cousin,” he said, the casual tone he tried for rather spoiled by the croaking sound of his voice. He wasn’t thirsty, precisely, given the gallons of river water he’d swallowed, but the strain of expelling all that water from his body had torn up his throat.
“Good to be seen.” Zaltys kneeled, tugging futilely at his shackles. “Magical chains,” she said. “I have no idea how they work, there’s not even a keyhole.”
“I noticed. A shame I lost my pack. There was a knife inside.”
Zaltys held up a pack by its sodden shoulder straps. “This pack?” She opened it, and drew out the sheath. “This knife?” Drawing the blade, which flashed green in the dim light. “Where did you get this, anyway? Borrow it from your father’s desk drawer?”
Julen shook his head, rattling his chains. “See if it’s magical enough to cut through these, would you?” As Zaltys slipped the blade into the link of a chain, he explained that they had a secret benefactor who’d left the blade and a source of fresh water in his pack, among more mundane supplies. “Any guess who it might be?”
“No idea. No one knew about my plans.” She jammed the blade in and began twisting the hilt.
“Then how did you find the pack?”
“Attached to a dead derro in a tunnel,” she said.
“The labyrinth man,” Julen murmured. Zaltys ignored him. “How did you come to find me, then?”
“Another derro. A live one. He told me you were down here. Well, he didn’t tell me, exactly, but I inferred.”
“Did he have glowing bug guts in his beard?”
“The very one,” she said. “I gather you two met.” She grunted and gave the dagger a final hard twist.
The link holding his wrist shackles to his ankle shackles gave way, and Julen stifled a scream as he was, finally, able to stretch out his limbs. The agony of releasing his cramped muscles was simultaneously horrible and delicious. Zaltys ignored his contented, pained moans and broke the links closest to the shackles on each ankle and both wrists, carefully coiling up the remaining chains and stuffing them into a pack—Julen’s pack, he noticed. Well, that was fair. She’d been carrying a lot of extra weight. It was his turn. “In case we can use them for something later,” she said. “Not sure I can do anything about the shackles themselves, unless you want me to risk jamming this knife between your wrists and the metal …? No? I thought not.”
Julen stood up, continuing to stretch and bend and work his protesting muscles. “It’s fine. Chunky metal bracelets and anklets are all the rage among the fashionable youth in Delzimmer this season. So what now? Retrace our steps and flee with our lives?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “We’ve come this far. Might as well see it through, otherwise we’ve just wasted a lot of time.”
“If you insist.” He shouldered his pack and looked toward the dead kuo-toa, wondering if they should rifle their bodies to see if they had anything worth stealing. The idea was distasteful in the extreme, not because of any inherent moral hesitation when it came to robbing corpses—he was a member of the Guardians, after all, whose unofficial motto was “Do Whatever’s Necessary”—but because the kuo-toa were just so loathsome.
“What do you call those, then? Come across them in your books?”
“Kuo-toa,” Julen said. “Fish people.”
“Ha. Fishmeat. They’re the fish, and I was supposed to be the meat. Some joke.”
“You lost me,” he said. “But that’s all right. I’ve been down here long enough to be used to being lost.”
“These fish people. Are they dangerous?”
Julen nodded. “Reckoned to be one of the most dangerous of the races dwelling in the Underdark, though really, none of those races are what you’d call harmless. Apparently they’re prone to plagues of madness that can sweep through a whole community like the flu—or fin fungus, I suppose. These seemed sane enough, but who can guess what’s happening in a fish-person’s mind?”
“Communities. So this isn’t likely to be some isolated family group, then, that just happens to live in this pool.”
Julen shook his head. “I don’t t
hink so. Hunting or scouting party, I’d guess. The pool is probably connected to a bunch of subterranean tunnels.”
Zaltys sighed. “In that case we’d better be going, and quickly. I was holding onto a sunrod when I fell over the waterfall, but I lost it when I hit the water, and for obvious reasons, I couldn’t swim down to retrieve it. Sunrods are remarkable devices. Did you know they go right on glowing even when they’re submerged in water?”
Julen whistled. “Creatures down here seem to be fairly sensitive to light.”
“Yes. We’ve left a handy beacon for any fishfolk that come swimming by, which will lead them to a trio of their murdered kinsmen.” She put her booted foot on the back of one kuo-toa’s neck, grasped her arrow, and pulled it free, shaking the slimy tissue off the arrowhead before putting it in her nearly-empty quiver. She retrieved the other two arrows, humming tunelessly as she worked.
Julen counted. “Do you really only have nine arrows left?”
“Yes. I do have extra bolts for these horrid little hand crossbows, but I ran into a little trouble and spent several arrows I couldn’t recover.” She nudged a kuo-toa with her foot. “Shame none of this lot were archers. I’d take their harpoons, but I don’t know how to use them, and I’m already clattering when I walk from carrying all this excess ordnance.” She yawned. “Now that we’re together, we’d better find a place to eat and take turns getting a little sleep before we try to find the slaves. I imagine it’s daylight up above by now, and this running around all night is starting to wear on me. And I could do with drying out—this magic armor sheds water nicely, but I’m soaking otherwise. I need to get this stuff off me and air out my skin a bit.”