Venom in Her Veins (forgotten realms)

by Tim Pratt

  A few hours later Zaltys found Glory near the cook tent, gnawing a rib bone and frowning. Zaltys sat down on the rough wooden bench across from the tiefling and said, “Is that man all right? Rainer?”

  Glory grunted. “I scanned his mind. Ugly mess in there. Very dark. Lots of mental blocks, which I didn’t care to push through, because who wants to see what kind of horrible snakepits of memory he’s had to cover up? He is who he says, though, as far as I can tell. Poor bastard.”

  “He was underground?” Zaltys said, horrified. “All this time?”

  “You know about the Underchasm,” Glory said.

  Zaltys nodded. “Where all that land collapsed.” The Underchasm was a pit the size of a sea, collapsed in the great upheavals that had made Delzimmer a coastal city.

  “What do you think all that land collapsed into?” Glory said. “There are vast caverns beneath us. The Underdark.” She shuddered. “Rainer’s been down there.”

  “What, lost?”

  “Enslaved,” Glory said. She tossed the bone, picked clean, on the ground for the camp dogs. “His mind’s a wreck, but he’s in good shape physically. Toiling for monsters underground is good exercise. Be careful if you go out in the woods. Whatever monsters took Rainer and dragged him underground could be looking for him.” She yawned. “Probing his mind was too much like work. They had me clean things up in there a bit too, so he could maybe sleep again someday. I couldn’t take away all the bad experiences, though, not without turning him into nothing but a body without thought or will. The bad experiences are too much a part of who he is. Ugly business. I need a nap.” Glory rose and sauntered away.

  Zaltys went to her mother’s wagon, knocked on the door, and entered at her mother’s call.

  Alaia looked up from her folding desk, where she was writing a letter. “Oh, hello, dear,” she said absently. “Quite a lot of commotion this morning, hmm?”

  Zaltys unfolded one of the camp chairs tucked into a corner and sat down. “Is that man all right? Rainer?”

  Her mother sighed. “For a certain value of ‘all right,’ I suppose so. He went through terrible ordeals, things we can’t even imagine. But Glory was able to soothe him a bit.”

  “What will happen to him now?” She thought of the broken men she saw sometimes in Delzimmer, begging for coins by the harbor or just sitting, blank-faced, in empty doorways. Would that be Rainer’s fate?

  “He was lost and injured while in the employ of the family,” Alaia said. “So the family will care for him, just as we would for a laborer crippled in the fields or a soldier maimed in our service. He’ll always have a livelihood in our employ.”

  “He won’t … He can’t become a guard again.”

  Alaia shook her head. “He was one of Krailash’s best men, but that was long ago. If he recovers fully and he wants to-but no. I think, once the family physicians and healers have made sure he’s not too ill, he will be given some less difficult task to do. A position in one of the households, or working in the gardens or kitchens. And if he’s not up to even that much work … Don’t worry, he’ll be kept comfortable.”

  Comfortable. Zaltys imagined him sitting in a chair at a window, staring out at some peaceful vista, his mind broken. “Where is he now?”

  Alaia gestured vaguely northward. “I sent him back to Delzimmer on horseback with a couple of the guards. Having him here in the camp, talking about slavers stealing people away into the darkness … I didn’t want him worrying the laborers. And, besides, I’m sure he wants as much distance between himself and this jungle as possible.”

  Zaltys touched the hilt of the knife at her belt. “But shouldn’t we be worried about slavers? Glory said whoever took Rainer might be looking for him-”

  Alaia put her pen down and massaged her writing hand, wincing as she pulled each finger and made the knuckles pop. “Glory enjoys making people worried and uncomfortable. But, yes, I’ve posted more sentries around the camp, and Krailash is letting his people know they should be alert. If any nasty creatures do come boiling up out of a hole in the ground, we’ll drive them back. Now, my darling daughter, if you don’t mind, I need to write a few more letters, to arrange for Rainer’s care back in Delzimmer.” Alaia shooed her away, so Zaltys folded up her chair and left the wagon.

  She decided to go looking for Krailash, but she found Julen along the way, squatting in the shadow of a supply cart, an array of glittering bits of metal spread out on a cloth before him. Zaltys crouched down beside him, though she stayed out of the shade. Unlike most of the other people in camp, she didn’t mind the heat of the sun pounding down on the clearing. “What’s all this?”

  “Lockpicks,” he said, holding up a narrow twist of black metal and squinting at it. “I had to leave home in a hurry, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget anything.” He sighed. “Not that there are any locks worth speaking of to practice on out here. What with the general lack of doors. My skills are going to get all rusty out here in the wilderness. I don’t know how I’ll pass my practical exam this fall. At least I’ll be able to keep up with my poisons and knife-throwing-no end of nasty creatures out here to kill, at least. And I’m sure I’ll be bitten by dozens of horrible animals, which can’t hurt in developing my resistance to poisons. Did you know in the Guardians we eat tiny amounts of poison for breakfast every day, to build up immunities? We’re supposed to carry a ridiculous array of antidotes and anti-venoms with us too. I must say, I prefer the bits of the job that involve knives.” He rolled up the cloth of lockpicks and tucked it away in a small traveler’s pack.

  “You Guardians and your toys,” Zaltys said, shaking her head.

  He snorted. “This from a woman with a clutch of magical arrows in her quiver?”

  She laughed. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day?”

  Julen looked around, then beckoned her closer. Zaltys obligingly leaned in. “I was belly-down on the roof of your mother’s wagon, my ear right next to the chimney, eavesdropping,” he said.

  Zaltys widened her eyes. “You were spying on my mother?”

  Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do. We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”

  “Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”

  “Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”

  Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that. They were talking about Rainer?”

  “They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he was imprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”

  Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”

  “Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”

  Glory, Zaltys thought.

  “Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”

  She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”

  Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers-it was the same day they found you.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”

  “I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.

  “Ah. The
y … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.

  Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said. He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him.”

  Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”

  “People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”

  “But why? Why tell me my family was dead?”

  “Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”

  “Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of course, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really considered that they might be real. “If he … wait … did Rainer see my family down there?”

  “He didn’t say. And your mother didn’t ask, at least, not that I heard. Rainer said there were other human slaves, though, along with snake people, bullywugs, kuo-toa, and creatures he couldn’t identify. The slaves labored in mushroom fields, harvesting food, and were used as live bait to catch horrible blind fish the derro like to eat, and sent in to do war against the enemies of the derro, which are, I gather, everyone in the world. Rainer says the creatures are mad, and coming from someone as broken up as he is, that’s saying something. He said he saw horrible things in the service of the derro.” Julen shook his head. “They fought the servants of gods whose names have been forgotten by the surface world. Living pools of blood. Creatures with wings like razors. Beholders. Purple worms, and once, a purple dragon. He finally saw a chance to escape in a recent battle, hid in the tunnels, and started following a snake because he had no other idea where to go. The snake led him to fresh air, and a crack in the rock, and once he reached the surface, he wandered until he found some river that leads to a waterfall-”

  “Shattered Rainbow Falls,” Zaltys murmured. “It’s a day’s walk, but it’s beautiful there.”

  “Yes. From there, he knew the way to the caravan site, and that’s how he found us.”

  Zaltys stood, swaying a little from the hard wind of the revelations Julen had brought. “But if Rainer survived all these years, then my family might still be alive down there. In the dark. In thrall to monsters. If that’s true, family is the most important thing. It’s the one thing in this world I know to be true, family is everything.” She shook her head. “But he’s probably just crazy. I’m sure his mind is a mess, he must be misremembering, it was nearly twenty years ago, after all. What if he’s just mad? Mistaken?”

  “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.”

  Chapter Eight

  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 jus
t 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.