by Tim Pratt
Zaltys nodded, but kept her arrow nocked on the string, though she didn’t draw. The bow was magical, its arrows capable of avoiding obstacles to strike what the bow’s wielder tried to hit. Would it be able to thread its way through those phantom tentacles? If she tried that and failed, would Iraska simply kill her?
“I propose,” Iraska said, “that you return to the surface with those few humans I still have in my slave pens. I use them as front-line troops when we fight with other races down here, so there aren’t many alive, but I think I have a few lying around the armory. Take them with you. Say they’re your family, your fellow villagers—the humans will believe it, and they’ll revere you for coming to save them. Be triumphant. Otherwise, go about your business. Rise in power, as I did when I was your age. Marry a powerful man—someone in the Guardians would be best, though not young Julen, he’s seen too much here to be allowed to run around free. Ascend to supreme leadership of the Serrat family—I’ll help if there are any obstacles in your way. And when the time comes, I will ask a favor of you. Nothing too difficult. Just opening a few doors in the city, to let me and some of my derro savants in, under cover of night, of course. Certain entities of the Far Realm are impressed by sacrifices, you know. We will open a portal, and let a few choice creatures through. I have the power to open huge portals already, though I’ve kept it a secret from the other derro—they’re not models of patience and plotting, I’m afraid, unlike the yuan-ti. When the stars are right, with your help, the people of Delzimmer will die, but they’re only human, mostly, with a scattering of dwarves and elves and other races of no particular consequence. Nothing a yuan-ti like you should concern yourself with. What do you say?”
“You’re insane,” Zaltys said. “I’d never betray my people that way.”
“Betrayal is in your blood, dear,” Iraska said. “And I think you will, because your return to the surface won’t be a complete triumph; your cousin Julen will be lost down here. I promise I’ll take good care of him, though, as long as you behave. If family is so important to you, I’m sure you’ll obey me while I hold the power of life and death over your kin. Rather stupid of you to tell me the easiest way to control you, Zaltys. But I’ll teach you subtlety yet.”
Something flashed by Zaltys, streaking toward Iraska’s body. Her spectral balhannoth tentacles appeared, reaching for the missile—but Iraska screamed as green vines erupted, wrapping up the tentacles. She flickered, briefly invisible, but a vegetable eruption dragged her back to the place where she’d been standing. Suddenly the guards by the door charged over, but the growing mass of green caught them too, and pulled them down, covering them in leaves so thoroughly they vanished from sight. Where Iraska’s desk had been, there was only a mound of greenery, with the hilt of a knife sticking out from the top.
“Huh,” Julen said, limping over, climbing up the side of the green mass, and plucking the dagger from the mound before climbing back down. “So that’s what this knife does. Pretty impressive magic.”
Zaltys stared at him. “Julen. You were poisoned.”
He rolled his eyes. “Cousin, I’m a Guardian. We specialize in poison, both adminstering it and surviving it. My father poisons my oatmeal in the mornings just to give me extra practice, and I’ve been taking tiny doses of various toxins to build up immunity since I was four years old. When I felt myself wavering, I realized she’d put something in my drink, and I took one of the emergency pills my father packed for me, for those occasions when one can’t avoid being poisoned. Tastes like charcoal, though I gather there’s magic in it too. Then I just played dead until I saw an opportune moment. I thought maybe this knife, being magical, might slip through her tentacles, but I didn’t expect this.” He prodded the mound of leaves with his foot. “Now I wonder even more who gave the dagger to me.”
“So you were awake,” Zaltys said. “You heard everything.” Her hope of somehow escaping and keeping the secret of her true nature drained away.
He shrugged. “So you’re yuan-ti. Great-uncle Gustavus is a lycanthrope, and—this is a Guardians secret—our head of overseas enforcement is an adopted half-orc, though he looks like a very tall and ugly human. You’re family, Zaltys. That’s what matters.”
She shook her head. “If that was all that mattered, why would mother have lied to me about what I am? And Krailash hates yuan-ti—she must have lied to him too, otherwise I think he’d have killed me out in the jungle years ago.”
Julen chewed his lip in thought. “Yuan-ti don’t seem like very nice people, but as far as that goes, we Serrats aren’t always very nice people, either. You were raised as one of us. You don’t worship the yuan-ti snake god, you don’t poison people, you aren’t—” he grinned “—especially subtle. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a Serrat. And your secret is safe with me.”
It was true. Zaltys didn’t worship Zehir, but knowing she was yuan-ti put her dreams and visions in a new context. She had no interest in Zehir, but what if that god of poisons and darkness was interested in her?
“Do you think we should flee while we still can? Before something unspeakable squeezes itself out of that portal up there?”
Zaltys nodded. “Yes. But I need to go to the mushroom fields and free the slaves. Even if my villagers are snake people and cultists of Zehir, they’re still my people, and they deserve better than this.”
“All right,” Julen said, shrugging into his pack, but keeping the green-wrapped knife in his hand. “I’ve come with you this far, and I won’t turn my back on you just because your relatives turned out to be a little unsavory. I assumed they’d be uncouth jungle savages with dirt in their hair anyway. The fact that they’re fork-tongued, uncouth jungle savages who don’t have any hair at all shouldn’t change things substantially. I just hope they don’t try to kill us.” He inclined his head to the mound of vegetation, which was starting to go brown and die around the edges already, perhaps because Julen had removed the magical knife. “Do you think anyone will notice your auntie is out of commission?”
“No one sees the king while the king is the king,” Zaltys said. “I think we’re okay, assuming we can get upstairs without being killed. I wish we could kick this whole mess of greenery into the water, but it would be like trying to kick an orchard. I wonder if my mother left you the knife? It seems a bit primal, but I can’t imagine she’d have let you come down here if she’d known what we had planned.”
“We’ll ask her when we make it to the surface again.” They walked around the pool and unlatched the heavy wooden door. The guards outside didn’t pay them any attention as they emerged. Presumably the sentries were meant to keep people from going in, and had very little interest in whether anyone came out. The savant who’d led them downstairs was still on the ground, possibly dead, though the robe of eyes was gone. Her skin, pale as curdled milk, was covered in strange tattoos, also of eyes, but they were all closed, lids and long lashes drawn down.
Zaltys and Julen stepped over her gingerly and went up the stairs. They reached the hall of miniature kingdoms and tried not to look into them, but a voice called from the first one they passed. “Humans!” it shouted, and they looked in to see Bug-eater seated in an ornate (if chipped) gilded throne, his feet propped on a dead derro he’d arranged into a sort of corpse foot stool. “Was your meeting with the Slime King all you’d hoped?”
“Very informative,” Zaltys said. “Have you renounced your vow of incomprehensibility?”
“I am the lord of all I survey, excepting the hallway,” he said, “and so it behooves me to make myself understood. Would you like to come in for dinner? There’s a crack in the wall swarming with beetles. They taste a bit like gecko and a bit like bat and a bit like human.”
“Thank you. Perhaps another time.” Zaltys gave him a little bow, which Julen hastily copied, and Bug-eater waved at them in lofty dismissal.
An array of screams and grunts and the scrape of metal on bone emerged from the other rooms, but none of the other little kings called
out to them as they went past. They ascended the far staircase without incident and emerged into the grand museum hall, which was strangely deserted. As they hurried among the exhibits, they saw why. One of the portals to the Far Realm, near the forge, was birthing a monstrosity of lashing tentacles, and all available derro had gone to man the nets to drag it down.
“If Iskara reveres things from that place so much, why does she capture them?” Julen said.
Zaltys shook her head. “I think Iskara is after something bigger. She mentioned something the size of a world with eyes. And she seemed to have contempt for these other aberrations. Didn’t you tell me aboleths are possibly the oldest things in the universe?”
“So I’ve read. Do you think Iskara’s just insane? That she’s trying to open portals for something that doesn’t even exist?”
“Maybe,” Zaltys said. “But it’s not something I’d care to risk. I wish there was a way we could close these portals. It’s a shame they didn’t close when you killed Iskara.”
Julen frowned. “Did I kill her, though? She was wrapped up in vines, yes, but is that enough to kill something as old and powerful as she seems to be? Or did we just trap her?”
“That’s a happy thought,” Zaltys said. “Let’s hurry and free the slaves and get out of here before we find out whether’s she’s dead or only inconvenienced.”
“All right, we’re probably looking for something near the mushroom fields, but those were vast, they fill almost this whole cavern, so where do we start—”
The pale snake came slithering down the steps, curled around Zaltys’s feet, and looked up at her. Zaltys stared at it.
“Ah,” Julen said after a moment. “Are you talking to the snake?”
“No,” Zaltys said. “I can’t do that, as far as I know. I’m just thinking. Trying to figure out whose pawn I am, exactly, and how I can be sure the next move I make is my own.” She flicked her fingertips at the snake. “Go on then. Show me the way to my family, or go away forever.”
The snake lowered its head and began undulating across the square, and Zaltys and Julen followed.
“I don’t understand,” Krailash said, staring at the portal, and the terazul vines. “The plants—they come from another plane?”
“A plane so alien that just a glimpse of it strips sanity from the mind like corpse beetles tearing flesh from a dead body,” Alaia said. She was sitting on the ground, and her spirit companion appeared to be asleep, two things that made Krailash profoundly uneasy. “And we’ve been selling people potions and powders made from a flower rooted in that plane. The visions people have when they take terazul tinctures, the energy and strength they feel when they ingest the powders, the madness that certain addicts fall into—the ones we call weak, the ones we’re so careful to blame for their own downfall—they’re all gifts of horrors from the Far Realm. What if the vines aren’t plants at all? What if they’re the tentacles of some ancient slumbering creature drifting through the infinite layers of the Far Realm, and the flowers are something like hairs, or warts, or fingernails? What if we’re strengthening the power of aberrations in this world?” Alaia drew her fingers down her cheeks, so hard her fingernails drew blood, so it appeared she was shedding red tears. “What have I done, Krailash? I’m a shaman. Defender of nature, servant of the primal world and peddler of poisons from a place inimical to everything I thought I believed in.”
“I’ll chop through the vines,” Krailash said, lifting Thunder’s Edge, though practically speaking, the problem was more difficult than that. The portal through which the plants emerged hovered near the cavern wall some twenty feet up, and he wasn’t sure he could climb that high, as the wall was distressingly smooth.
“No,” Alaia said sharply. “Kill those vines, and you reduce our family’s fortunes by half at a single stroke. If word got back that I was responsible for the loss of supply, everyone in my family would turn against me. I would be stripped of my position, and even my name, shunned and exiled. You know family is everything to me, Krailash—you can’t do this. And with no terazul, there’s no need for Travelers. What would become of you?”
Krailash shook his head. “But you said it yourself, they’re from the Far Realm—we can’t let them continue to poison the world!”
“There’s the world,” Alaia said, with a small shrug. She reached out and touched her spirit companion’s head, and seemed to address her next words to the boar. “And there’s family. I’m a Serrat. I will always choose family.”
Her spirit companion stood up, looked at her with wide-eyed sorrow, and shook its gray head. The spirit boar took a step, and then another, and seemed to walk out of reality enitrely, leaving no trace behind. The shimmering curtain of sparkles and shadows that covered them abruptly dissolved. “Alaia,” Krailash whispered. “What happened?”
She shrugged again. “I made a choice. As a shaman, I am a defender of the natural world from outsiders and aberrations—shamans exist, in part, to combat the influence of the Far Realm. If I can’t do that, if I choose not to do that, how can I be a shaman? It’s a good thing I’m incomprehensibly wealthy and a skilled administrator, because I’m not a shaman anymore.”
“What do you mean? The primal world has forsaken you?”
Alaia laughed bitterly. “The primal world doesn’t notice me, it’s not conscious, it’s just power. But …” She made a sad grasping motion with her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers. “Now that power is like smoke. I can still sense it, but it’s receding, and when I try to let the power flow through me, it slips through my fingers. I think I’ve forsaken it. In truth, it’s been harder and harder to access my abilities with every passing year. Too much time spent in cities. Too much time putting things other than the fate of the world and nature itself first.” She shook her head. “And now it’s all gone. If we’re going to get out of here alive, it will be based on your strength as a warrior.”
Krailash stood between Alaia and the field of mushrooms, because as they were no longer magically hidden, it was only a matter of time before an overseer noticed them.
“Or will you turn on me too, as my power has?” Alaia said. “Have I shown you the true face of my avarice, and disgusted you?”
“I made an oath when I came to work with you, to serve the Serrat family, specifically the Travelers, specifically you. Dragonborn stand by their oaths. I was always disgusted by the family business—though I admit, thinking you were mere drug peddlers was better than knowing you were unwitting pawns of the Far Realm. What if those flowers are doing more than poisoning people—what if they’re poisoning reality? Part of some effort to annex our world to that plane of madness? I have heard the stories your family tries to keep quiet, about the children of addicts born dead, and deformed—”
“Children of drunkards are sometimes stillborn, or born twisted too,” Alaia said, but without much conviction.
“The children of drunks are never born with tentacles,” Krailash said levelly. “But you misunderstand me. I made oaths, and I stand by them. I will still serve you, despite everything.”
“You’re a good friend, Krailash.”
He shook his head. “A good friend would try to talk you out of this, Alaia, and convince you to kill those flowers. No. I’m a terrible friend. But I’m an exceptionally good employee. Should we look for Zaltys’s people? She might be with them.”
Alaia didn’t get up from the ground. “Zaltys doesn’t have any people, Krailash. Not human ones, anyway. She’s not a woman—she’s a yuan-ti. Her village was a cult of snake people. She just looks like a human. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s a mythical chosen one, born once every ten generations. Or maybe she’s a throwback to humanoid stock in the yuan-ti bloodline. I always wanted to believe the latter. But ever since you met that god, I’ve been afraid it’s the former.”
Krailash lowered his guard long enough to stare at her. “But … You mean Zaltys is a spy?”
“No, I mean her family are yuan-ti. She was just an inf
ant when they were taken, and she was raised as a human—as far as she knows she is human, unless she was unlucky enough to find the yuan-ti slaves and learn otherwise. I just hope they can’t sense their own, and that they won’t recognize her as one of them.”
“But she could have been tainted by Zehir,” Krailash said, horrified by the thought. He’d taught Zaltys to fight, hunt, stalk, kill—and she was a snakeman? Had he given the weapons that might kill him to one of his enemies? “The cultists of Zehir and Sseth are subtle, Alaia, you’ve never had to fight with them, but I have—”
“Our psion Glory checked out her mind thoroughly,” Alaia snapped. “Zaltys is my daughter, and you’re sworn to defend her too. You’re so ridiculous on this subject—it’s why we wipe your mind every time you find out.”
Krailash gaped. “I—you’ve tampered with my mind?”
Alaia gave him a thin smile. “Just a little. All legal, of course. Read your contract. When you signed, you gave us permission to protect vital family secrets—and the fact that Zaltys is yuan-ti is one of them.”
Krailash wanted to swing his axe at her: at Alaia, the woman he’d worked for and joked with for three decades, the woman he would have called his closest friend, even minutes ago. He let Thunder’s Edge sag loose in his hands. “You didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth about Zaltys? Of course it’s a shock to hear, but I’m sure in time I would have gotten used to it.”
“I didn’t want to risk that you’d forget your oath and try to kill her, Krailash. Though I depend on you, and trust you, and care for you. Zaltys is my daughter. I never wanted to hurt you—that’s why I had Glory wipe your memories—but I had to keep my daughter safe. I needed you to keep her safe, and I didn’t know if you could continue to do that, if you knew the truth about her.”