Venom in Her Veins (forgotten realms)

by Tim Pratt

  The child cried again. “That’s no serpent spawn,” Krailash said. “Sounds human to me.” He’d heard the mewling of human children before, and something deep within his armored heart turned over at the sound. His adventuring days were behind him. For the past ten years and more he’d been a protector instead, and that cry was the sound of someone who needed protection. “There are a few human refugees and halfing tribes in the jungle,” he said after a moment. “Though I know of none so close by. We shall see. Rainer, you and Marley come with me. The rest of you, watch the harvesters.”

  The young, jug-eared guard Marley swallowed but stepped forward. Rainer drew his sword and took the rear as Krailash pushed his way through the jungle. At nearly seven feet tall, and weighing three hundred pounds, Krailash was not the largest or strongest thing in the jungle, but he was far from the smallest or weakest. After spending so many years on the caravan route, he knew the likeliest dangers well, and broke his trail with confidence, sweeping aside branches and vines with his axe. He paused whenever the child cried out, adjusting his direction as necessary. Sound carried strangely in the jungle, bouncing off the towering trees and occasional overgrown ruins of old halfling settlements and yuan-ti temples.

  The wall of green parted before his axe, and a clearing was revealed: a broad courtyard of once neatly-jointed stones, long since jostled out of true by the slow motions of the earth and the growth of tree roots underneath. A squalling, naked child with skin the rich brown of new leather lay in the shadow of a pillar. The stone was carved with the likeness of some extinct jungle beast, eroded into a shape of vague menace by the weather of centuries. Fresh blood spotted the stones nearby, and there were other signs of recent violence: broken bits of weaponry, shreds of torn cloth, a few teeth scattered on cobblestones.

  The child was naked, tipped on its back, limbs waving like an overturned turtle. Female. Krailash had always found the sight of human infants vaguely alarming. They were so helpless and needy-unlike dragonborn, who could walk and feed soon after emerging from the shell. They became self-sufficient in a few years. When Krailash’s shadow fell across the girl child, shielding her from the sun, she quieted, and gazed up at him with wide eyes the same rich green as terazul leaves. If she found the sight of a seven-foot-tall rust-scaled humanoid dragon frightening, it didn’t show-but for a child so young, everything was new, and most things were probably more interesting than frightening.

  Rainer walked the perimeter of the courtyard, looking at the signs of battle, while Marley just swallowed and stared at the scattered teeth, which were not human or dragonborn: they were long, needle shaped, and bloody at the roots.

  “The blood’s not dried yet,” Rainer said, crouching to examine the stones. “You can see the undergrowth is broken there, people were dragged away.” He shook his head. “The yuan-ti must be better organized than you thought. Either they missed the child or didn’t think she was worth eating, or raising to be a slave, or sacrificing to their anathemas. The monsters left a trail as broad as a boulevard in Delzimmer, easy to follow … Did you want to investigate?”

  Krailash considered. He was philosophically opposed to slavery and the sacrifice of sentient creatures, and besides, this had happened rather too close to the trade route for his liking. Assessing potential dangers to the family trade was part of his job as head of security. If there were unusually bold yuan-ti-or something worse-operating here, it would be good for him to know. “I do.”

  Rainer nodded. “What about the girl?”

  “Marley will take her to Alaia. You and I will follow this trail.”

  “Just us? Alone?”

  Krailash showed his teeth. He’d been around humans long enough to learn how to smile. “Alone? Not at all. I’ll have my axe, and you’ll have me.”

  Rainer picked up the child and thrust her at Marley, who took her as if she might be venomous. The infant squalled at first, then clutched at the front of the guard’s shirt and tried to gnaw one of his buttons. “She’s a tiny thing,” Rainer said. “Amazing she survived whatever happened here. I’d never want one of my own, of course, but I can see the appeal. Cute.” Rainer was almost as tall as Krailash and not far short of his weight, all of it battle-hardened muscle, so he could afford to speak sentimentally, whereas someone scrawny like Marley had to make a far greater show of toughness. Rainer touched the girl’s cheek. “She makes you feel … protective, doesn’t she?”

  Krailash nodded, though he knew his protective instinct sprang from a different source-he didn’t find tiny apes cute, exactly, but he hated to see the harmless and the innocent endangered. “Step quickly, Marley, and be watchful. Tell Alaia we’ll report back before nightfall-and if we don’t, she should close ranks and move the caravan out.” Krailash doubted the woman would obey, at least not readily. In theory, Krailash’s word was absolute in matters of caravan security, but if he wasn’t physically present to make sure Alaia listened, she might decide she knew better, and stay to harvest another day.

  Hard to blame her, when a day spent gathering flowers would eventually translate to enough gold to buy a small house in town or a large farm in the country.

  Marley nodded and set off, the infant nuzzled against him, chin resting on his shoulder. The child’s green eyes seemed to look straight at Krailash, but it was surely coincidence-as he understood it, infant humans were appallingly nearsighted, lacking the keen vision every dragonborn had at birth, lost in a world of blurs and light.

  “After you,” Rainer said, and Krailash grunted, looking away from the child to the path broken in the jungle brush. He walked slowly, axe in his hands, trying to make sense of the trail sign, but he was no ranger. Should have called for the head of the caravan scouts. All he could tell was that a great many people had passed this way, some resisting that passage violently. The path was big enough for Rainer to walk beside him, and they moved in silence for a long distance, the jungle gradually closing back over them from the relative openness around the ruined courtyard. Whoever had attacked the child’s tribe hadn’t attempted to cover the tracks of their departure at all, which suggested either stupidity or confidence.

  Rainer tripped over a stone and swore. That stone was the first of many-they were back in the ruins, among the rubble and fragments of vine-encrusted walls. Colorful snakes slithered away from the path as they approached, which could mean there were yuan-ti nearby-the serpentfolk tended to attract snakes-or it could mean nothing at all. The jungle was full of slithering things.

  The path was harder to follow in the ruins, since there was no longer a pathway of broken and crushed vegetation, but some of the prisoners had been bleeding, and spots of blood left something of a trail. They picked their way over the stones and over broken bits of statuary until they reached a relatively intact wall that butted up against a huge doorway: two massive, weathered stone slabs standing upright, with a third slab laid across the top. The structure still had a roof, though it was damaged and pocked with gaping holes. Anything could be waiting inside.

  “Well,” Rainer said, voice pitched low. “Do we go in?”

  Krailash listened intently, but didn’t hear any signs of life inside. He knew from bitter experience that prisoners, even cowed ones, weren’t usually silent-there were sobs, whimpers from injuries, fierce whispers. “I will go in,” he said at last. “You wait here, to make sure no one ambushes us from outside.”

  “Yes sir.” Rainer lifted his sword, a tight grin on his face.

  Krailash stepped through an archway wide enough that he couldn’t have touched both sides with his arms out-retched, and into what might once have been a temple. The carvings on the wall were relatively well-preserved, and they looked like the work of yuan-ti, all twining serpents and fangs and a many-headed snake he recognized as one aspect of Zehir, a god of poison, darkness, and treachery. Krailash, like most dragonborn, valued honor above all else, and this vile deity of the snakemen was abhorrent to him. He was glad their settlement had crumbled so far, but sorry t
hey still persisted at all.

  He took a step forward, eyes adjusting to the dimness just in time to stop him from plunging into the pit that filled the center of the temple.

  At first, Krailash assumed the ten-foot-wide hole was part of some dark ceremonial function of the yuan-ti temple, who were said to keep pits of snakes and to hold their venerated monsters underground to receive sacrifices, but a moment of study showed him the chasm in the floor was actually evidence of some catastrophe. The edges were cracked and ragged, stones heaved up and statuary toppled on the edges, with only impenetrable darkness within. Was it a sinkhole, or …?

  No. There was a single bright drop of blood on the edge of the pit. The prisoners had been led here and taken down into the dark. Perhaps not yuan-ti slavers at all, then, but something worse: some subterranean dwellers from the Underdark, the vast system of caverns, tunnels, lightless seas, underground rivers, and hidden cities that legend said formed a savage world beneath the world. Yuan-ti certainly weren’t the only creatures with fangs in their mouths. Krailash shivered. Despite his reptilian appearance, he was as warm-blooded as any human, and the thought of innocents dragged into those lightless depths by savage drow, or brutish kuo-toa, or fouler races he’d never heard of, chilled his blood and troubled his heart.

  Well. He wouldn’t be going down there. But he could do something about this particular doorway to the depths-

  He heard something from outside, a dull thud that could have been a falling stone from the ruins, or something more ominous. “Rainer!” he shouted, and then looked uneasily at the hole in the floor, wondering if his voice would call attention to whatever lived within. The other guard didn’t answer, and Krailash hurried for the entryway, emerging into the light to find Rainer gone, his sword on the ground. A faint shout gave him a direction to follow, and he ran deeper around the side of the temple where he found another crack in the earth, this one smaller, but opening on the same black depths.

  Rainer’s helmet rested, upside-down, on the edge of the pit.

  Whatever had stolen the child’s village away had stolen Rainer too. And it was Krailash’s fault for coming alone, and not bringing sufficient support. He considered leaping into the dark, roaring and swinging his axe, but Rainer had been a capable fighter too, and that hadn’t helped him. The enemy could be using poison, traps, ambush, anything. Rainer’s loss was a blow, but the safety of the caravan was paramount. With a last look around-the jungle could hide almost anything-Krailash set off for the caravan at a run. He needed help to neutralize this threat.

  Loath as he was to admit it, he needed magic. Magic could accomplish in moments what it would take twenty men with shovels and picks a tenday to do.

  Chapter Three

  Krailash stopped by the harvesting operation to assuage his worry that the whole party had been kidnapped by dwellers from the Underdark, but everything there was business as usual, the workers carefully plucking petals from the terrible, beautiful flowers and putting them away in baskets. “Where are Rainer and Marley?” one of the guards asked, but Krailash ignored him, barked orders to pull the harvesting detail back to the caravan, and led the way. The trip to the camp didn’t take long, but to Krailash, it felt like the march of a thousand miles through hostile territory in wartime. When they reached the camp, he finally allowed himself a deep exhalation of relief. The perimeter was marked with wooden posts topped by faintly-pulsing purple and red crystals that their wizard, Quelamia, assured him would keep the mindless jungle beasts away, and his sentries were on the lookout for other dangers. Krailash hurried past the paddock where the oxen were contentedly munching their feed and producing copious quantities of manure-fortunately upwind of the camp proper-and hailed his guardsmen. “Tell Alaia I need a moment of her time,” Krailash said, and a messenger dashed away.

  The war-wagons were arrayed in the camp’s outer ring, with bowmen on guard in each, and four of Quelamia’s apprentices spread out, each armed with a rod enchanted to throw fireballs or spit lightning or spawn freezing winds. Inside the defensive ring were the tents of the soldiers, and inside that, those of the laborers and the cook wagons. At the very center stood three wagons that were, essentially, houses on wheels. The smallest was Krailash’s, an unassuming wooden box on wheels with arrowslit windows; the armor reinforcements didn’t show.

  Beside it, like a tropical bird perched next to a drab sparrow, rested Quelamia’s wagon, more a sculpture than a dwelling, made of living wood from the Feywild. Where Krailash’s quarters were all squares and angles, Quelamia’s looked more or less like a live tree somehow growing impossibly on a wheeled platform, complete with leafy branches that sometimes bore strange fruit. No ox ever pulled her cart: it moved under its own powers, immense wheels rolling smoothly over even uneven terrain, branches swaying. Trust a wizard to make a home in such a strange whimsy.

  The final wheeled home was even more impressive, in its way, since it had been made by wealth, not magic. The wagon had the look of a cozy cottage, made of rare kopak wood-strong, flexible, and the color of sunlight streaming through jasmine honey-joined seamlessly and shaped by a master craftsman, with decorative carvings around the door and roofline. The windows were made of real glass, and there was even a working fireplace and chimney, as if anyone needed heat in the jungle. The front door swung wide when Krailash approached, and Alaia herself stood in the doorway, holding the now-sleeping infant child in her arms. Her hair was long and black, and though Krailash was no judge of human beauty, he’d heard it said Alaia was attractive, in a severe and aloof way. Certainly her blue eyes seemed to hold humor and strength in careful balance: she was seldom angry, never acted in haste, and nothing could sway her from her course once she’d chosen it.

  Those were exceptionally good character traits for a merchant princess of the Serrat family. Krailash had never thought of his employer as motherly, but she held the child as comfortably as if it were her own. “Come in,” she said, standing aside, and Krailash entered her home.

  The interior might have been a room from a lavish country estate, but if one looked closely, one could see the small efficiencies and precautions: tables that folded up into the wall to stay out of the way, furniture fixed in place on the floor, shelves and cupboards that could be secured to prevent the contents spilling on bumpy roads, magical lights instead of candles-because magical lights couldn’t fall over and catch the carriage on fire. A few of the lady’s small carved totems stood on shelves, looking merely decorative to the untrained eye, but allowing Alaia easier access to her vast shamanic powers if the caravan were ever directly threatened.

  Alaia shut the door behind them and sat in her customary armchair, gesturing for Krailash to sit on the ironwood bench-the one utilitarian piece of furniture in the place, simple and strong, kept just for him.

  “Tell me about this,” she said, looking down at the infant.

  So Krailash told her: the child’s cry, the sounds of violence, the ruined temple, the opening to the Underdark, the disappearance of Rainer. She took it all in silently, then said, “Do you think we’re in danger?”

  Krailash nodded. “Of course I do. Thinking we’re in danger is my job. But we are … rather formidable. My guards, combined with Quelamia’s magic, make us a difficult target. But they seized one of my men, and we have to assume they’ll interrogate him and find out the details of our defenses. I don’t know what they’ll do with that information, though. Attack us, or leave well enough alone? The problem is, the enemy is unknown, in kind and in motivation. Are they slavers? Devotees of some mad god? Are they drow? Duergar? The Underdark is vast, home to countless races, and I don’t know enough about the place to separate the stories I’ve heard from truth. I have to assume the danger is real. That we could be attacked, and overwhelmed, and all of us dragged into the dark.”

  “What do you propose?” Alaia said. “This is the best place for the terazul harvest. The secondary and tertiary sites are less fruitful, and not really far enough away to make a
difference anyway. I’m loath to leave, and what-never come back?”

  “That’s precisely what I advise.”

  “And if I reject that advice?” A small smile touched her lips. “As you know I’m inclined to do?”

  “An overwhelming show of force,” Krailash said. “To shut off this particular passageway to the surface, and show them we’re not to be trifled with.”

  “Mmm,” Alaia said. “You’ll want Quelamia.”

  “I will.”

  “She gave up being a war wizard before I was born. She won’t like it.”

  Krailash shrugged. The question of liking, or not liking, a particular chore seemed irrelevant to him. Duty was duty. One did what was necessary. “She has the power, though. She doesn’t often need to use it, but she can.”

  “Oh, yes. The family pays her for what she can do, as much as we pay her for what she actually does. All right. Tell her I’ve agreed.”

  Krailash stood, then hesitated. He nodded at the child. “What will you do with …” He almost said “it,” but Alaia had an unusual look of tenderness in her gaze as she looked at the infant, so he said “… her?”

  “Ah, that’s the question, isn’t it? You know, there are factions in the family that want to see me married off and bearing children, before I get too old. Of course, some of them mutter that I’m too old already. But this little one … Well, it sounds like all her people are dead or, at least, lost. We have some obligation to care for her. Assuming she’s healthy and otherwise sound, I thought I might adopt her.”

  Krailash nodded slowly. That wasn’t unheard of in Alaia’s family, and usually happened a few times every generation. The family was the business, and among the Serrats of Delzimmer, marriages were made carefully, for maximum tactical and financial advantage, but over the generations they had occasionally adopted orphans and foundlings, on the theory that such outside additions kept the bloodline fresh. There was no particular risk in the practice. If the adoptees proved profligate or unreliable or otherwise unsuitable to business, it was no matter-they were shunted into some irrelevant side-channel of the family’s sprawling enterprises and given an allowance sufficient to keep them occupied. No one became fully vested in the family, given voting power or a percentage of the family profits, until they’d reached at least their late teens and proven themselves responsible and worthy, or proven themselves suitable only for irrelevant work or, in extreme cases, exile from the family. “I see. Would you want to train her in the business side of things, or the more, ah, practical aspects?”