Venom in Her Veins (forgotten realms)

by Tim Pratt

  “The Far Realm,” said a voice behind them.

  Stupid, not to set a guard, Julen thought. But if it’s just one of them, maybe we can …

  He and Zaltys turned. There was just one derro standing before them, smiling-it was an incongruous expression on such a hideous face-and wearing a robe covered in what appeared to be living, blinking eyes of various hues. Zaltys thought the derro was female, though she didn’t look noticeably different from the males-a trifle shorter, perhaps, but mostly the difference was in the higher pitch of the voice. The derro woman wasn’t even armed, unless the obviously magical robe counted as a weapon. But there were another dozen derro arrayed a dozen steps behind her, holding their wicked little hand crossbows, some of them muttering to themselves, others bouncing on the balls of their feet, and one scratching his chin with the barbed point of the bolt in his loaded weapon. They looked the sort to shoot on a whim and not bother to ask any questions later.

  “Our spells aren’t perfect yet,” the smiling derro said. “We’ve managed to create pockets of potential in which semistable portals to the Far Realm sometimes form, and many of us have developed the ability to open what might best be termed windows to the Far Realm, through which the mind-altering wonders of that place may be glimpsed-it’s instructive for our study, and useful as a weapon, since such glimpses of the Far Realm tend to drive the uninitiated mad, at least temporarily. Long enough to club them over the head and chop off their arms and legs, anyway. Would you like to see? No? Very well. Then if you don’t think we should drive you mad and experiment on you, what should we do with you instead? Armed invaders don’t often make it this close to our settlement, and I’m curious why you’ve come.”

  Julen was fairly certain that was a trick question, so he was glad when Zaltys spoke up, because it meant he didn’t have to. “We are emissaries from the surface, with a proposal for the Slime King.”

  The derro in the back began to murmur among themselves, the points of their crossbows wavering but not entirely moving aside-shifted enough that their shots would probably maim rather than kill, which was small comfort.

  The smiling derro took no notice. “I am a savant of the People, sometimes called the Slime Clan by the lesser races, and I am in personal service to the Slime King. You may give me any message to pass on. I’m sure by the time I have an answer for you you’ll still be alive, though possibly not in exactly the same body you started out in.”

  “The message is to be delivered personally,” Zaltys said firmly. “Or we’ll simply leave, and your king won’t ever know what we have to offer.”

  “Leave? No, no, that’s not likely.”

  “Wait here, Julen, while I show them what we can do,” Zaltys said, and faded from sight like a shadow disappearing in the sun.

  Wait here, Julen thought. Like I have any choice. It was a bold bluff, no mistaking. He was sure his admiration for his cousin’s bravery would be a great comfort to him if he died.

  Zaltys reappeared a moment later on top of one of the spindly towers nearby, bow drawn, arrow unmistakably pointed at the savant, who’d finally stopped smiling. “This is a good sniper position,” Zaltys said. “If you had any sense, you’d have bowmen of your own posted here.”

  “Yes, fine,” the savant said. “You can make yourself very nearly invisible in dim light. We’re all very impressed. But didn’t you notice my robe is covered with eyes? I can see invisible things, girl, which might hamper your escape.”

  “Oh,” Zaltys said, nonplussed but quickly recovering. “Not if I put an arrow through your eye, it wouldn’t.”

  “A point,” the savant said. “Now come down from there. Don’t make me open a portal and drive you mad. Playing with your food is slightly less fun if the food’s too mentally distressed to realize it’s being eaten. I’ll take you to the Slime King. There may even be a reward in it for me, like getting to watch you be consumed by something with more eyes than tentacles and more tentacles than teeth. Asking to meet with the Slime King is like a fish asking to be hooked and gutted and worn like a hat.”

  “You wear gutted fish like hats?” Julen asked.

  “Only on Fish Day,” the savant said impatiently. “Now come down from there, archer.”

  Zaltys faded from sight again, and reappeared beside Julen. Most of the guards wandered off when it became apparent there would be no immediate killing, but a couple of others trailed along as the savant led them toward the Collegium-including one with glowing green smears in his beard.

  “I know you,” Julen said.

  “Me too,” Zaltys said. “I tied you up and left you by a waterfall. No hard feelings?”

  The derro grunted and said something in a strange language. The other guard said, “He’s taken a vow of incomprehensibility. He speaks Deep Speech to those who speak Common, Dwarvish to those who speak Elvish, like that.”

  “But he spoke to me in my own language earlier,” Zaltys said.

  The guard shook his head. “Impossible. Must have been someone else. We derro are nothing if not rigorously consistent.”

  “So what did he say just now?” Julen asked.

  The derro shrugged. “I respect his vow, so I choose not to understand him.”

  “Oh.” Julen thought for a moment. “What’s Fish Day?”

  “No idea,” the derro said. “Never heard of it. Savants are all lunatics if you ask me. So. Be honest. Are you the agents of Zhentarim here to kill the Slime King and allow me to ascend to the throne?”

  “No,” Zaltys said carefully. “That’s not us.”

  “Ah well. They’ll be along soon enough I’m sure. My sister’s skull, I keep it in my sleep-hole, it told me my time of glory is nearly here, and I just need to bide my time, so that’s me, here I am, I’m biding.”

  Bug-eater said something and laughed.

  “Truer words were never spoken,” the other derro said, and wandered off just as they reached the broad stone steps. The derro who’d been murdered in front of the Collegium earlier was completely naked, his clothes all stolen, and another derro in a filthy white apron crouched by his head and methodically shaved off his hair with a rust-speckled straight razor.

  The inmates are running the asylum, Julen thought.

  “The Slime King is quite deep in the chambers below,” the savant said, pausing between two massive pillars. “I can’t be responsible if you’re killed by anything along the way. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me your message?”

  Zaltys shook her head.

  The savant sighed. “Fine, then. Let’s go.”

  Bug-eater said something that sounded as if it were meant to be reassuring, but followed up by pointing his crossbow at them meaningfully, so Zaltys and Julen went after the savant. “Welcome to the center of derro innovation and magical science,” she said. “Mind your step. Some of the puddles down here will melt your feet off and feast on the slurry left behind.”

  Julen glanced down, instinctively looking for such deadly puddles, and noticed the pale snake was still with them, slithering along unnoticed in their wake. Definitely something strange going on there, but compared to the mysteries and oddities he’d encountered in recent days, it barely rated a mention.

  Chapter Seventeen

  "We’re following a snake,” Alaia said. “And as far as I can tell, it’s just a snake. I’m fairly well attuned to the primal whispers of the natural world, and they tell me: ordinary cave snake, lives on bugs and rodents, no particular intelligence.”

  “And yet, you’d think a normal cave snake would want to avoid a heavily-armed dragonborn instead of behaving like a frisky kitten.” Krailash’s head moved in a constant side-to-side sweep, his senses alert for the possibility of ambush, with Alaia holding the sunrod aloft. They were back on the Causeway, a broad avenue of blood-smeared stone smashing straight as an arrow shaft through caverns large and small. The snake led them along at a steady but not punishing pace, and Alaia’s spirit boar acted as their forward scout.

  “I
doubt that snake’s afraid of us,” Alaia said. “If it lives down here it’s dodged significantly worse things. It’s probably just leading us to its favorite mouse hole.”

  “I doubt that. A god set it on this path.” Krailash skirted one of the smears of dried blood.

  “So you said. I believe in the gods, of course, but I’ve never had much use for them. I revere the wild, and the wild was here before most of the gods, and it will outlast them. It’s hard to imagine a god taking any interest in our situation, though, especially one as unpleasant as you describe.”

  “You’ve never doubted one of my reports in the thirty years we’ve been together,” Krailash said mildly. “Is there a reason you doubt me now?”

  She scowled. “All right. I believe you saw what you say you saw.” He started to object, and she held up her hand. “And I suppose I believe your interpretation of what you saw too. A god. A god who made a body out of snakes, who takes an interest in Zaltys, who loves secrets and whispers … I find the idea rather troubling. I don’t want to believe it. The implications are too disturbing. I want to believe you were deceived by some trickster creature, some lying Underdark denizen, a larva mage or a drow illusionist or something.”

  “Not impossible,” Krailash said. “But we’re lost in the Underdark, and the snake, at least, gives us something to follow.”

  “Last time we followed something down here it led us into a trap,” she grumbled.

  The snake slithered toward the jagged opening of a tunnel leading off the Causeway. “A change of direction,” Krailash said. “A hopeful sign.”

  “Mark my words, we’ll find nothing but a nest of newborn rats. Which might make a nice change from these trail rations. You could break your teeth on them.”

  “Perhaps you could, but my teeth are of altogether stronger stuff.”

  They stepped into a cavern spotted with blood, the floor scattered with bits of shredded flesh. Predators and prey of the Underdark had clashed there, and recently, but there was no sign of any living monsters.

  Or so he thought at first. Something fluttered near the ceiling, and Krailish squinted upward, fearing they’d stumbled upon another swordwing. He’d expected the Underdark to be full of things that crawled and oozed and slithered; the presence of things that flew was even worse. But whatever the creature was, it wasn’t the size of a swordwing, and seemed more like a bobbing balloon with trailing tentacles.

  Grell. The derro who’d led them to the swordwing hive had mentioned such things: blind floating hunters bearing barbed tentacles. Krailash was a melee fighter, but he would have given much for a javelin or a bow or even a sling; the creature was beyond the range of his axe, even if he made a great leap. He exhaled his icy breath upward, hoping to stun the creature and make it fall to the ground, where he could make short work of it with Thunder’s Edge. But the creature floated aside with surprising agility, and Krailash’s breath just limned a few stalactites in frost.

  “Krailash, what-” Alaia said, but then a great pain burst in his head, and black flowers blossomed in his vision, and he fell to his knees. His mouth filled with the taste of copper and rotten meat, and Alaia was shouting but he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t understand, there was something in his mind-

  He stood up, though not because he willed it. His vision took on a reddish tinge. The grell is controlling me, he thought, terrified, as he raised his axe. He tried to fling the weapon away, but the effort was futile. Gods, the horrors of the Underdark were unending. He tried to tell Alaia to run. Even with her powers, he might be able to strike her down, especially because she was looking at him with concern, asking if he was all right. She hadn’t noticed the grell floating high in the cavern like a puppetmaster pulling Krailash’s strings. If she didn’t try to defend herself, he could split her in two with one blow of Thunder’s Edge, and what greater horror could there be for one such as himself, who held honor sacred above all else? To murder the woman he’d spent the past three decades trying to protect?

  Krailash raised his axe high.

  “This is the center of derro learning and civilization,” the savant said, “So it goes without saying, it is the most learned and civilized place in the world.”

  Bug-eater said something cheerful and began pointing to various objects, grunting as he gestured: the world’s worst tour guide.

  Zaltys didn’t spend much time in museums back home; she preferred exploring ruins in the wild to seeing fragments of ruins neatly brushed clean and mounted in glass display cases. She’d only been to Delzimmer’s centers of art and history once or twice, and this place was similar, though there was usually less blood on the floor of the museums back home. Beyond the pillars of the front steps was a wide, open area punctuated by low stone display pedestals, holding an astonishing array of strange bric-a-brac, with derro savants in robes strolling around, peering at the exhibits, and scratching on wax tablets with styluses. The savant bustled them along fairly rapidly, so Zaltys couldn’t look at any of the exhibits too closely, which was probably a blessing.

  They passed a messy pile of gems, with clods of earth clinging to their shining facets; a scale replica of the Collegium itself made entirely of neatly stacked and balanced coins-probably looted from surface-world slaves, and worthless as currency there; and a petrified dragon’s egg as big as a derro, with various incomprehensible signs and sigils scratched into its surface-either mystical writing or graffiti, Zaltys wasn’t sure.

  But the most striking exhibits were the exemplars of various Underdark races, taxidermied specimens dressed in the bloody remnants of their own armor (if they were races that wore clothes) and standing in lifelike-and usually warlike-poses on their pedestals. They passed a kuo-toa clutching its harpoon, and one of the jellyfish things Julen had called grell dangled from the ceiling on wires. Julen murmured the names of the ones she didn’t recognize: A bullywug leaning on its spear. A myconid with its helmetlike mushroom-cap head, holding a club of gnarled, hardened fungus. A swordwing with one of its arms and one of its wings missing. A beholder, not resting on a pedestal but jammed on top of a pointed stick, so from a distance it appeared to float, its eyestalks drooping and blind. An illithid, its long brown robes rather charred, its horrible mouth-tentacles singed as well. Something even Julen didn’t recognize, a humanoid figure with its skin flayed away, bits of armor fused directly to its exposed muscles, holding a whip made of linked spinal vertebrae, the jutting bone spurs sharpened to spikes.

  As they passed that one, Zaltys saw its eyes move in its immobilized face, tracking her, and she realized it wasn’t dead and stuffed but somehow alive and petrified, frozen in stasis by magic and made into a living statue. Zaltys shuddered. The creature was horrifying, yes, but no monster deserved a fate like that. How many of the other exhibits had been alive too, and she simply hadn’t noticed? What kind of creatures could create a museum like this?

  Zaltys had come into the Underdark to rescue any of her family that survived. That remained her mission. But if possible, she would also flush the derro out of the bowels of the earth as well.

  “From this angle you can see the face of the aboleth,” the savant said, and pointed up.

  Zaltys and Julen tilted their heads back. Julen gasped, and Zaltys let out a low whistle. An eel-like shape, thirty feet long and dangling tentacles and whiskers and shredded fins, was suspended from the ceiling by metal chains, and from their position, near the back of the central chamber, they could indeed see its face if one could call it a face, with those vertically-aligned, dead eyes, that lip-less mouth, those whiskers the thickness of a man’s leg.

  “An aboleth,” Julen said. “They’re supposed to be the most fearsome creatures in all of the Underdark.”

  “Nonsense,” the derro savant said briskly. “You’re thinking of the derro. Though that particular aboleth was a sort of honorary derro for a while-it used to be Slime King.”

  Julen glanced at Zaltys, licked his lips, and said, “Is the current Slime King also an a
boleth?”

  “The Slime King is derro,” the derro said. “By definition. The highest of the high of the Slime Clan, who are the best of all the derro, just as the derro themselves are the best of all the races.”

  Zaltys pointed to the thing hanging from the ceiling. “When that creature up there was Slime King, was it derro? By definition?”

  “That’s what I just said,” the savant said, scowling, and the eyes on her robe began to blink furiously. “Why can’t you listen?” She jerked around on her heel and stalked off toward a doorway at the back of the Collegium, and Zaltys and Julen followed, because what else could they do? If they tried to leave, they might be allowed to walk right out, but more likely they’d be killed, or frozen and perched on pedestals. Bug-eater was still trailing along behind them, still aiming his crossbow generally in their direction, so cooperation seemed the wisest course.

  The savant led them to a stone stairway that spiraled down for a few dozen feet before ending in another doorway. A wide hallway lined with open doors extended straight as a ruler before disappearing into gloom. There were lights down there, in the form of flickering smokeless torches set at irregular intervals, but they cast only small pools of light. “Straight down the end of the hallway,” the savant said. “And mind you don’t stray into the side rooms. They are sovereign microkingdoms, each populated and ruled by a single derro doing particularly interesting experiments, and if you pass over their thresholds you are subject to their absolute rule, which means, in practice, that horrible things would happen to you. As long as you stay here in the hallway, which is subject to the Slime King’s rule … Well, horrible things will probably still happen to you, but not as quickly.”

  Zaltys couldn’t resist looking into the first few doorways they passed. What would a “sovereign microkingdom” of the derro look like? The first just had a naked derro, body covered in a calligraphy of scars, snoring on a pile of inexpertly-skinned pelts, flies buzzing around him. In the next, a robed derro sat at a work table, furiously sketching on pieces of thin hide with a chunk of charcoal grasped in his fist, and he would have looked like any scholar anywhere if not for the fact that one of his arms was missing, replaced by a long, ropy tentacle that lashed and twitched and writhed seemingly of its own accord.