by Tim Pratt
Zaltys gestured to the ghost boar, which looked back at her with the sort of infinite, weary patience that serves for impatience among the spiritually enlightened. “Mother summoned me. Any idea what it’s about?”
“Sure.” Glory lifted a long, black pipe to her lips and took a puff, smoke rising in curls from her nostrils.
“Well?” Zaltys prompted.
“Horseman arrived a little while ago,” she said, taking another puff, clearly enjoying drawing things out. Glory liked to play mind games. “With another horseman behind him. Or should I say, horseboy. Krailash yelled at them for a while-he yelled at the older one, anyway, the kid just stood there looking annoyed and embarrassed-and then took them to meet with your mother. The horseman left a few minutes ago. But the boy … He’s still in your mother’s caravan.”
The boar snorted and started walking.
“What’s it all about?” Zaltys said.
“Nobody tells me anything,” Glory said. “What am I, a mind reader?”
“Yes,” Zaltys said.
“Bah,” Glory said. “You assume I care enough to read anybody’s mind.” She slammed the heavy black door after her, disappearing from sight.
Like all conversations with the tiefling, it had been more frustrating than illuminating-but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a little illuminating. Zaltys followed the ghost pig, reaching back to scratch the diamond-shaped spot of scarred skin at the small of her back. It itched sometimes, but only when she got close to the jungle. Something to do with the humidity, her mother said. She’d made up an ointment, but it never did much good.
Two things that always wait for me in the jungle, she thought. The itching, and the dreams. On the whole, she’d rather have the itches. At least the ointment helped a little. Nothing helped the dreams: not the expensive sleeping potions her mother brought for her, not Glory’s attempts to make her forget the dreams instantly upon waking, not Krailash’s suggestion that she train so hard that she collapsed into a dreamless sleep at night. Her dreams were never troubled in the city, but as soon as she reached the jungle, they began. It was enough to make a girl want to sniff some terazul powder, even if using the drug was forbidden to the family, and stop sleeping entirely.
They’d reached her mother’s wagon, a cozy little house on wheels. Zaltys slept there too, on the rare occasions when she didn’t simply sleep out under the stars or in a tree branch (always with guards posted below, as if she needed them, but Krailash wouldn’t let her do it at all otherwise). Still, despite her tiny bed tucked into a corner of the wagon, it was entirely her mother’s domain, all carved figurines and crystals and that odd combination of finery and efficiency that characterized the Traveling Serrats.
Zaltys went in without knocking, and stood, gaping, in the doorway. “What are you doing here?”
“That’s no way to speak to your cousin,” Alaia said, her blue eyes stern. Her spirit companion curled up at her feet, untroubled by the fact that it had to pass through her legs to do so, then vanished like mist rising from a lake in the morning. Alaia sat on a little divan, holding a delicate teacup. The boy beside her held a teacup too, though he didn’t look too happy about it. He looked, in a word, surly, his gaze downcast, his lips pursed, his dark hair hanging across his forehead and nearly covering his eyes.
“My apologies,” Zaltys said. “What are you doing here, Cousin?”
Julen shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “They made me.” Then, with a trifle more heat: “Dragged me out of bed. Made me ride horses for a tenday! My rear-” He glanced at his aunt and cleared his throat. “I’m not used to riding so many days in a row. Or eating all my meals out of saddlebags.”
“Your cousin,” Alaia said, “is on loan to us, from his father in the Guardians.”
Zaltys made a great show of looking around the room. “I don’t see any spies from rival families. I don’t see anyone trying to burn down our caravan, or steal our horses, or do anything that we’d need protection from.”
“His father thought it would be best if he learned some practical field work. To find out, as it were, what exactly he’s protecting.”
Zaltys frowned. “Then why didn’t he come with us when we left? Why send him chasing after our dust cloud for days?” She paused. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you, Julen. I always had fun playing chase and ambush and hide-and-find with you when we were small. And of course it’s nice to have more family around.” That was an axiom of life in the family, which was also the family business, though her mother sometimes amended it to, “It’s always nice to have family around … preferably around the next corner, or even farther away, if you can manage it.”
“I was supposed to join you, but I overslept.” Julen didn’t look at her. For a member of the Guardians, who were arguably even more deceitful by nature than the Traders, he wasn’t much good at lying. Presumably telling lies was something you got better at as you practiced, like throwing knives or shooting arrows.
“He ran away,” Alaia said. “Didn’t want to spend the next three months out in the bushes with the savages and the wild animals, if I understand his father’s letter correctly.” Julen attempted to sink into the divan, without much luck, and Alaia smirked. “Of course, my brother had some choice words for me too, since I didn’t send anyone to fetch him before we left. But my caravan is not a palanquin, waiting to carry this young man anywhere he likes at his leisure. My caravan is like the sun. The sun rises when it rises, and my caravan goes when it goes.”
Zaltys pulled over a chair and dropped into it, noting her mother’s moue of distaste at the dirt and leaves on the cushions, bad form-but not reacting to it. “Why would you want to stay in the boring old city anyway? It’s much more fun out here in the world.”
“Clean water,” he said, beginning to count on his fingers. “Which doesn’t have to be boiled before you drink it. Soft beds. Food that doesn’t come packed in a barrel or bleeding on the end of a hunting spear. Games, and parties, and shops, and walking by the harbor, and a library, and …” He shook his head. “What’s so good about the rest of the world? Nature? We build cities and great big walls to keep nature out.”
“Without nature you wouldn’t have any of the wealth that buys you all those other things you mentioned.” Alaia was amused. “Zaltys, be a dear and show your cousin some of the diversions to be had around camp. But don’t take him into the jungle without an escort, all right? My brother would not be forgiving if I let his son be killed by a deathrattle viper or a carnivorous vine.”
Julen stood, scowling. “I don’t need guards. I’ve been trained in knifework and unarmed combat by the head of security for the Guardians! I’m a pupil of the greatest street fighters in the city of Delzimmer, and-”
“There are things in the jungle that would take your knife away, use it to clean their teeth, and then stick it through your head hilt first,” Zaltys said. “Dagger-fighting is fine for drunkards in bars-though you’re only, what, twelve, so I guess you’re too young for that? — but it’s not much good in the jungle.”
“I’m fifteen, as you well know. And my daggers can-”
“Yes, fine,” Alaia said, rubbing her temples as if she had a headache coming on. “Take the discussion outside. Perhaps you can teach Zaltys some of your knife tricks, Julen, and she can teach you some of the ranger skills she’s picked up over the years.”
Zaltys left, Julen at her heels, and once they were on the ground outside, the door slamming shut after them, she sniffed. “I can’t make a ranger out of you in a summer, but maybe I can teach you which end of the arrow you point at your prey, and which leaves you shouldn’t wipe your bottom with, unless you want a case of the bloody itch.” Just saying the word “itch” made her reach around and scratch at the scar on her back.
“Why would I want to learn to be a woodcutter like you anyway?” He made a face. “What’s that smell?”
Zaltys opened her mouth just a bit, not enough for anyone to notice-she could smell better wh
en she could taste the air with her tongue, for some reason, a quality she shared with no one else, as far as she knew-and then gagged and spat. “The latrine pits,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. “Or possibly the animal pens. We’re upwind, mostly, but sometimes the winds shift.”
“Wonderful,” he muttered.
“Come on. You must be hungry after your trip. Let’s get some of that caravan food you were so eager to try.”
Julen groaned theatrically, clutching his belly. Zaltys couldn’t tell if he was genuinely complaining or just trying to be funny. They’d been friends when they were children, often playing together in the gardens, but that was before his studies with the Guardians and her journeys with the Travelers had necessarily pulled them apart. In recent years they’d only run into one another at family gatherings, and since the Travelers were out of the city for half the year, Zaltys missed most of those. The Guardians were a secretive bunch anyway. Zaltys had a few cousins she’d count as friends as well as relations in the Traders (not all of them were obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth; some of them were obsessed with numbers instead, which Zaltys could respect if not understand), but as a rule the Guardians kept themselves apart. They were the second-smallest branch of the family, consisting of just Zaltys’s uncle Ramul and his wife and many children, plus hirelings. But they wielded disproportionate power. If anyone committed the cardinal, unforgiveable sin-betraying the family-the Guardians were the ones to mete out punishment. And, in more practical terms, they kept rival trade groups from interfering with business in either legal or more underhanded ways. The Guardians had a certain mystique, and Julen’s brothers and sisters were spies, assassins, and masters of sowing rumor and deceit, but Julen himself was the youngest, and maybe he thought his family’s prowess and power accrued to him by right of birth.
But the family didn’t work that way. Birth got you certain things-you’d never wonder where your next meal was coming from-but if you wanted to advance, and take on more power and responsibility, you had to earn it. Zaltys wondered if this season with the caravan was a chance for Julen to prove himself, or punishment for his failing to do so.
She gently steered him around Glory’s wagon, since he couldn’t see it, and Glory wasn’t above letting people walk into her might-as-well-be-invisible home just for the amusement of seeing them hit their heads.
“Why do you keep scratching? Did you wipe with some of the wrong leaves?”
Zaltys, who hadn’t even realized her hand had strayed to the old sore spot, crossed her arms. “No. It’s … my scar itches.”
“Oh, I heard about that,” Julen said. “You got it before you were adopted, right?”
“Yes. When my village was killed, I was wounded. It’s never healed properly. Mother says whoever attacked us must have used some sort of cursed weapon. I’m lucky I survived.”
Julen frowned. “Yes, I remember. Ah. Sorry.”
Zaltys shrugged. “Thanks, but it’s not a loss I feel. I don’t even know my original parents’ names. They were massacred, along with the others. The caravan buried them after they rescued me. I’ve seen the heap of rubble they’ve got for a grave.”
“There you are!” Krailash boomed, approaching them with the implacability and approximate mass of an avalanche. “Where are you two going?”
“Just to get some food,” Zaltys said.
“If you’re hungry, you can stay,” the dragonborn said. “But our scouts stumbled across a shadow snake not far from here. It killed one of our men, and the others are doing their best to track it, but we could use your help.” He glanced at Julen. “Your cousin is one of our best trackers.”
Zaltys grinned. “Come on, Julen. You’re supposed to be learning stealth, right, as part of your spycraft? You’ll never see a better teacher than a shadow snake.”
“At home, I’d be eating grapes and some of the good sheep cheese,” he said glumly, “and possibly reading a volume of poetry. Or at least skulking through a nice dry hallway somewhere. Here, I get to traipse through the damp woods after a snake.”
“Yes,” Zaltys said. “You’re absolutely right. This is much more fun.”
Zaltys knew she was something like a princess. The city of Delzimmer had no noble class, no king, no aristocrats. Instead, the upper echelons of society were populated by the successful merchants and traders, and no matter how mean your birth, you could ascend to the ranks of the most powerful by sheer sweat, treachery, and ingenuity.
That was the theory, anyway. In practice, control of the city was held by several powerful merchant families. While the Serrats had not yet reached the pinnacle of power held by the ruling four families, their influence was growing every year. They’d risen to prominence following the great disaster that turned Delzimmer into a port city, taking advantage of the chaos following that upheaval to profit immensely. The Serrats had further enriched and entrenched themselves in the city’s society by becoming sole providers of terazul and the potent substances that could be made from the rare flower.
Zaltys was the only heir of Alaia, one of the three most powerful members of the family. During the six months of the year when she lived in the city, there were servants and tutors and bodyguards and social functions and ceremonial duties and meetings about profit projections and strategic realignment and diversification that she had to attend no matter how boring and abstract she found the topics. She wore dresses, and charmed old men from the Traders, and studied languages-not for ease of communication, because there were spells that would let her converse with people of other tongues, but because language revealed things about the culture that spoke it, and understanding other cultures was imperative to the success of the family’s far-flung business. Zaltys didn’t mind those months in Delzimmer, living like a princess, escorted everywhere by personal guards, eating fine foods and sipping watered wine and lounging in the Serrat’s private gardens.
But those months never felt entirely real to Zaltys. They felt like pretend: like the games she played with her nannies as a little girl, pretending to have formal dinners with her dolls, or making believe she was at a costume party, dressing in cast-offs from her mother’s wardrobe. The only time she felt entirely real was during the twice-yearly expeditions into the jungle, when the caravan took the workers to the few spots where the rare and precious terazul blossoms grew. For three months at a time, Zaltys stopped being a princess and became a ranger, armed with bow and knives instead of dessert spoons and pearl earrings, learning to live and love the wild, hunting for food and for pleasure and to protect the caravan from predators. She wanted to stay in the jungle always-despite the itch, and despite the dreams-because it was the only place she felt fully awake. She belonged there. She knew her mother felt the same way, though Alaia, being a shaman, had a somewhat different relationship with the natural world; no less reverent, but certainly less martial in focus. As a young girl, on her first trips with the caravan at age six or seven, Zaltys had pleaded with her mother to let them stay in the wild always. But, for various logistical and political reasons, it couldn’t be. Zaltys had come to understand these reasons as the years went by, although she never stopped resenting them.
In the jungle, she didn’t feel even remotely like a princess. She felt like a wild queen.
Chapter Five
Julen was no more comfortable in the deep woods than a cloth merchant, and he swore softly every time a thorned vine brushed him, and complained about the heat and humidity, which grasped them like a damp and sweaty fist. But Zaltys noted that he set his feet with care, and moved more silently than any city boy should be expected to-certainly more silently than Krailash, who was crashing through the brush some yards away with his own guards in hope of flushing out the shadow snake.
Such beasts were treacherous, and seemed not entirely natural. They could be enormous, twice the length of a man, serpents in shape but shadowy in substance, and they had the trick of traveling from one spot to another without crossing the inter
vening space. She’d never seen one up close, only glimpsing them twice in her past travels, and usually deeper in the jungle. Stories said they were remnants of some forgotten yuan-ti settlement, pets left behind when their masters died or moved on. Their venom was supposed to be unspeakably virulent-legend said that a limb bitten by a shadow snake would turn shadowy and insubstantial itself, not so much rotting away as gradually fading from reality-but Zaltys wasn’t overly worried about the possibility of a bite. She’d never been bitten by a snake, despite literally countless encounters with them, and anyway, the caravan had an ample supply of anti-venoms.
She put her hand on Julen’s shoulder, making him pause. They crouched among the thick-limbed trees near a clearing, where the vine-encrusted head of an enormous statue crowded the trees aside. “There,” Zaltys whispered, pointing.
Julen squinted. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s dim, but it’s there, just a coil of shadow in the shade of the statue.” The shadow snake was either hiding or waiting in ambush, as its kind preferred to attack from concealment. Zaltys could appreciate that. It was a tactic she favored herself.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Julen said.
Zaltys reached back to her quiver, feeling the fletching of the arrows, looking for one in particular. Her mother and Quelamia had provided her with a few arrows that had special qualities. One was tipped with the tooth of a salamander; another had an arrowhead made from a crystalline shard of the Living Gate, whatever that was; a third was coated in the slime from a basilisk’s eyes. Her fingers found the one she was looking for: feathers stiff with cold, so chilled they almost burned her finger. She drew the arrow, its head a vicious triangle of pure ice, and nocked it in her bow.
