by Tim Pratt
“I don’t see any humans,” Krailash whispered, fearing the worst. What if all Zaltys’s family had been killed long ago? Most of these other slaves were natural inhabitants of the Underdark, and probably better suited to the harshness of life there.
“I didn’t expect to,” Alaia whispered back. “But do you see Zaltys, or Julen? I don’t—” She paused, and stopped breathing, and Krailash looked at her with alarm. “No,” she whispered. “No, it can’t be.”
“What?” Krailash said, looking around for an enemy, and seeing none—or, at least, none that also saw him.
“The flowers,” Alaia murmured, and raised her finger, pointing.
Krailash hadn’t noticed before, but there were vines climbing up the wall of the cave, vanishing into the darkness above. They were covered in the familiar brilliant blue flowers that formed the foundation of the Serrat family’s power—terazul. “But that’s good,” Krailash said. “If there are terazul vines here, then the Guardians will definitely send a detachment to wipe out the derro, just to protect the monopoly.”
“The roots,” Alaia said. “Krailash, look at the roots.”
That would be something to see. No one on the surface had ever managed to pull up a terazul vine by the roots, they simply went too deep. Perhaps because they originated here, and the vines had only wound their inexorable way up to the surface over time. Krailash knew what Alaia must be thinking—perhaps a terazul vine transplanted with the roots intact would be more successful than mere cuttings were, and might be grown in a Delzimmer hothouse without losing its potency.
Krailash ran his eyes down along the course of the vines. The spread-out tendrils gradually drew together into a twisted central mass as thick as a tree trunk, which ran along the cavern wall in a roughly horizontal way until finally terminating in one of the blue-green spheres of twisting light. The vines emerged from that light. Wherever the roots took hold, it wasn’t in their world.
“Terazul are flowers of the Far Realm,” Alaia said, and her voice was like the sound of spring ice giving way beneath your feet. “I have devoted my life to spreading poison from a realm of madness.”
Zaltys raised her crossbow, loading in a bolt, and the guards by the door stirred, but Iraska said “Wait” in a commanding tone. “You wouldn’t shoot me, would you, Zaltys?” she said. “You don’t even know if I have an antidote.”
Zaltys swallowed. She hadn’t even thought of it—the instinctive reaction to attack someone who hurt her family had been too strong. Of course, the person she proposed to attack also claimed to be her family, but she felt more loyalty to the cousin who’d tried to help her than to the multiply-great-aunt who’d poisoned him. “Well? Is there an antidote?”
“No, but it’s hardly necessary.” She poured the contents of her cup into the pool. “The poison wears off after a few hours, actually. Usually that’s not a problem—we just include doses of the drug in the water rations we give to the especially savage and dangerous crop-slaves. We don’t bother giving it to all of our field workers, just the ones who have difficulty adjusting to the reality of their lives. Most of our captives are too broken-willed after a few days in the slave pens to cause us any problems.”
Zaltys looked at the cup in her other hand, and flung it at Iraska, who stepped neatly out of the way. The cup fell into the pool with a splash. “You poisoned me too? I don’t feel anything. And you drank from the same pitcher, so why don’t you …?”
She shrugged. “You and I are naturally immune to this poison, and many others. Julen, being merely human, has no such immunities. You see, my dear, you’re like me. You’re yuan-ti.”
Zaltys stared at her. “I knew derro were crazy. I should have known their leader would be crazy. You say you’re a yuan-ti, and I am too? Are you sure I’m not a minotaur? Or a purple dragon? Maybe you’re a grell.”
Iraska returned to her desk, seemingly unconcerned by the crossbow pointed at her. She settled down into her chair and leaned back, gazing at Zaltys. “They call us purebloods, Granddaughter. To your human ear that probably makes it sound like you and I should be exalted, I know, but yuan-ti see things differently. For people so closely related to snakes, being low is a virtue, and being raised high is nothing to be happy about. The most powerful of our race are called anathema, and those called abominations are also highly respected. Purebloods … Well, some see us as gifts from Zehir, admittedly. Tools of conquest. Others consider us shameful throwbacks. There is human—or, anyway, humanoid—ancestry among the yuan-ti, and occasionally that strain is especially strong, and a yuan-ti is born seeming almost human. But there’s always some telltale sign, some hint of the serpentfolk blood—a forked tongue, slit eyes, something. You’ve seen my fangs. When I lived among the humans, I had them filed down, but they grew back. How about you, Zaltys? Do you have anything like that? Perhaps a scar where a tail was removed? A patch of scales under your armpit?”
Though she didn’t consciously will it, Zaltys’s hand reached behind and touched the place at the small of her back where her skin was scarred, the place that always itched on her trips to the jungle, the site of the “fungal infection” that had to be periodically burned by the Serrat family chirurgeons with heated blades to keep it sanitized.
“Haven’t you noticed an affinity with snakes? If you’re with the Serrat family’s Travelers—which is hilarious for reasons I’ll explain once I have you settled in here—then you spend a lot of time in the jungle. Have you ever been bitten by a snake? Of course not. Because they recognize you …” she gave another hideous smile, “as family. And if you had been bitten, you wouldn’t have suffered any ill effects. The yuan-ti are bringers of poison. We are seldom poisoned. Do snakes, perhaps, follow you around? Look, there’s one now, it followed you in from upstairs, didn’t it?”
Zaltys looked at the pale serpent, which was apparently sleeping not far from Iraska’s desk. “It can’t be,” she said softly. “I can’t be. Yuan-ti are monsters. They do evil. I’m not evil.”
Iraska clucked her tongue. “You’re looking at it all wrong. Yuan-ti are the superior race, beset on all sides by implacable enemies who refuse to embrace the true faith—including heretics of our own race who embrace the doddering, outdated god Sseth instead of the vigorous Zehir. Our serpentine relatives don’t commit acts of evil—they commit acts of necessity. Is it evil to step on a scorpion before it stings you? Is it evil to swat a fly because it annoys you? You’re with the Travelers. That means you cut a swath of fire and sharpened iron through the jungle on a regular basis, displacing native creatures, destroying native fauna, all for your own purposes—is that evil? Of course not. It’s just self-interest. And the Serrat family? Ha. They spread poison on a scale most yuan-ti can only dream of, and what’s more, the people they poison willingly pay for the privilege!”
“Don’t talk about my family that way. You don’t know anything about them!”
Iraska’s eyes glittered in the torchlight. “I wouldn’t say that. I knew your great-grandfather, a bit. From your adopted family, I mean. He was a thug and a thief and a smuggler. Not a bad sort, for a human.”
“He was brave and resourceful, and he built a business from nothing.”
“He was reckless, which isn’t the same as brave. And resourceful, I’ll grant you that, but it was really just one resource: terazul. The first employees in that business he built were paid in terazul powder. Or should I say ‘enslaved.’ The man had a magistrate addicted to the stuff, and certain key officials, and even a few lesser members of the four great families of Delzimmer, who fed him the information he needed to succeed in business and politics. Because in Delzimmer, business is politics.
“I was a spy in Delzimmer, you see, for the yuan-ti in this part of the jungle. The wealthy merchants of Delzimmer thought I was a highborn lady from across the jungle—jumped-up shopkeepers always crave the attention of real royals, you see, and my coloration, which you share, was considered quite exotic. Things were going well for me too—
indeed, I was the mistress of a high-placed merchant, and since his wife was dying of a slow wasting disease, courtesy of my deftness with poisons, I was poised to become a power myself in time. Unfortunately, your great-grandfather decided to engage in a little covert assassination to seize some of my lover’s business interests at a reduced price, and once my patron was dead, his sick wife no longer tolerated my existence. I was suddenly homeless, and most decidedly unwelcome. I’d gone from beloved courtesan to cast-off trollop—so turns the wheel of fortune. I crawled back to the jungle in disgrace. So yes, Zaltys—I know your family. If we’re comparing evil for evil, it’s hard to say whether the yuan-ti or the Serrat would win.”
Zaltys wasn’t crying, but it was a near thing. She was still holding the crossbow, but she wasn’t aiming it at anything anymore. She kneeled down by Julen and began stroking his hair. He was breathing, slowly and steadily. That was a comfort, at least. “I’m human. I feel human. You’re trying to trick me. That’s your nature too. Yuan-ti are treacherous liars and—”
Iraska waved her hand and reclined in her desk chair. “Don’t be silly. I don’t consider myself a yuan-ti anymore. Oh, I am, by birth, like you, but just as you’ve been adopted into the Serrat family—a family of liars, I might add, who’ve obviously conspired heroically to keep your true origins from you, but that’s neither here nor there—just as you’ve become a human by association, I’ve more or less become a derro. Although,” she leaned forward, and stage-whispered, “I just consider them a means to an end. You see, when I returned from Delzimmer, carrying with me nothing but the clothes on my back and a few jewels that proved to be simply worthless shiny rocks in the jungle, I was horrified by what I saw. My sect was ailing when I left, and the hope was that my influence in Delzimmer could turn things around, bring us new human cultists and more resources, but even if I’d succeeded, we were beyond help. The anathema are precious to the god Zehir, and they’re formidable creatures, but they’re also prone to getting out of control. Ours had finally gone mad and killed almost everyone. Whether anyone could have stopped it was a moot point. The anathema are the most holy ones, chosen by our god, and so no one dared raise a hand against it. The old monster finally crawled into a hole and fell asleep, sated after eating half the tribe, and some enterprising low priest had a great heavy stone lid put on top of the hole, so the anathema could be revered from a safe distance, with sacrifices thrice daily. Pathetic. We were a mighty cult once, a power growing in the jungle, ready to burst out and spread our worldview with treachery and knives, but no more. I’d lived among humans long enough to gain a taste for the finer things, and the yuan-ti seemed hopelessly provincial, not to mention religiously obsessed. And why? Why revere a god who doesn’t pay attention to you, who gives life to a great sentient conglomeration of snakes and then lets it eat you for no reason? Mind you, I wasn’t the favorite daughter of the tribe, either, partly because I spoke my mind, mostly because I’m an ape-face. That’s what they call people like us—at least, once we fail the cult, and no longer rate any respect. ‘Ape-face.’ Lovely, isn’t it?”
Iraska yawned. “I don’t usually talk this much. The derro don’t go in for long conversations, at least, not coherent ones. Anyway, to draw a line from there to here, I went out walking in the jungle, got abducted by derro, and figured I’d suffer certain death. But then it turned out I’d learned some useful skills in Delzimmer after all. Politics, mostly. How to pour honey in a man’s ear and make him do your bidding.”
Zaltys frowned. Listening to Iraska’s story at least spared her from agonizing over her own nature, and despite herself, she was interested. “You’re the Slime King, I see it myself, but how can you advance by politics and”—disgusting thought—“seduction among insane people like the derro?”
“The derro are mad, but it’s an almost artificial madness, the curse of some god or another who grew angry at their transgressions millennia ago. All derro are mad, and though the exact manifestations vary, they’re all mad in exactly the same way. And when everyone in a culture is insane in exactly the same way, do you know what we call that? We call that a cultural norm. We call that sanity. All derro are megalomaniacal with delusions of grandeur, and paranoid with persecution fantasies. Those are wonderful qualities for a skilled manipulator to work with. It was easy to whisper my way out of the slave pens, turning guard upon guard, getting the ear of the king—it was an actual derro at the time, imagine that—sowing dissent and treachery among the factions, eventually organizing my own ascent to the top. Or the bottom, I suppose, if you’d like to get technical.”
“Queen of a tribe of homicidal lunatics,” Zaltys said. “You must be so proud.”
Iraska shrugged. “Are you proud to be heir to an empire devoted to giving addicts the drugs they use to kill themselves? Don’t misunderstand—I think you should be proud. Any accomplishment of great scale is worthy of pride, Great-granddaughter. Besides, the derro are just a stepping stone. I realized when I came back from Delzimmer that the yuan-ti aren’t the most powerful creatures in the universe. Far from it. They’re provincial little snakes, to use a human pejorative. Which is why I enslaved your village—my village—our village, and dragged them down here. Because I wanted them to know how pitiful and worthless they are, how uncaring their god Zehir is. I put them in the slave pens by the mushroom fields, where I’ll put your cousin too. If I made them soldiers, they’d all die in some skirmish or another, and why should I want our relatives to have the release of death?”
“So you’re as delusional as the derro, then,” Zaltys said. “You believe they’re superior, and you’ve made yourself one of them.”
“Oh, please. The derro believe they’re masters of the universe, prevented from ascending to their true level of greatness only by the treachery of their million insidious enemies. But that’s nonsense. Derro are degenerate scum. But Zaltys, there are forces in this universe that deserve adoration, beings so powerful their might surpasses mortal understanding. Not the little aberrations that crawl and float here in the Underdark, the beholders and the grell and the like, and not even aboleths, though the aboleths come closer than most. I’m talking about creatures that were ancient when the gods weren’t yet conceived of. Things so old and powerful they don’t even have names, or need them. Entities that don’t even notice our kind, except perhaps for a moment’s fleeting sensation of pressure as they crush us beneath their vast and crawling bodies. On the far edges of the sky, there are sentient galaxies that watch us with hungry eyes made of suns. Things the size of our entire world, the continents of their bodies studded with malevolent eyes. Gigantic serpents made not of flesh and blood but the substance of stars, capable of poisoning reality itself with their venom. Conglomerations of singing tentacles and lashing pseudopods that can entangle the substance of time and space itself. These beings live far, far away from here, but they’d like to come closer. They’d like to be let into this world. And they can give power beyond imagining to the one who opens the door. That’s why I took over the derro, because the savants here devoted their lives to opening those doors, and I needed to learn how. So I did, and now all the other derro who knew how to create these portals are dead, and I’m very close to perfecting my technique.”
Iraska lifted her hands, and a blue and green ball of heatless flame coalesced in the air above the pool of water. “Those beings of power live in a place called the Far Realm,” she said, her voice distant and dreamy. “And I am their herald.”
Since her great-grandmother was busy staring up at a portal to a plane of infinite, unimaginable horror, Zaltys took the opportunity to shoot the old woman in the neck with a crossbow bolt.
DESPITE THE LOUSY CONSTRUCTION OF THE DERRO crossbows, the bolt flew true and straight, and should have pierced Iraska’s windpipe, hitting her with enough force to knock her out of her chair. Zaltys had already dropped her crossbow and reached for her bow so she could take out the guards by the door when she realized her great-grand-whatever wasn’
t dying like she was supposed to.
Instead, a shadowy shape formed around Iraska, a sort of silhouette of lashing tentacles, and one of those tentacles seized the crossbow bolt from the air and snapped it in half. When the tentacles receded, the silhouette vanishing, Iraska began to laugh. “Did you like that? There’s a creature called the balhannoth that lurks in the tunnels, a blind stalker and ambusher, with lashing tentacles and a mouth big enough to swallow a derro whole. An aberration, of course, that slithered over from the Far Realm.” She touched the necklace at her throat, and Zaltys noticed that her bracelets matched, they were bone, wound with dark strips of leather. “This jewelry is made from the body of a balhannoth and imbued with certain enchantments, and grants me some measure of the dead monster’s abilities. Not just tentacles, but invisibility, and teleportation—not so different from the powers your little dead-snake skin gives you, though more potent, of course. You need shadows to disappear into.” She raised her hands, and the torches in the room flared into greater light, banishing all shadows from the room and making Zaltys turn her face away from the brilliance. “I have no such limitations. Let’s not fight, Zaltys. I know I’ve given you a lot to think about. You’re confused and distraught, so I forgive your little attempted murder. It would be a shame to make you into a slave when you could be so much more useful to me in other ways. Will you listen to my proposal?”
