Venom in Her Veins (forgotten realms)

by Tim Pratt

  Krailash noticed one of the derro-armed neither with a club nor a crossbow, but with shackles dangling from his belt-attempting to slip down one of the side tunnels. With a roar, Krailash used his breath weapon, disgorging a cone of icy wind that struck the derro slaver and froze him in place. Swinging his battle-axe, Krailash cut down the few derro that were still moving until he stood before the shivering slaver. The derro was almost child-sized, no taller than a dwarf and more slender, with eyes as blank as a snowy field and dead white strawlike hair sticking up in ugly tufts. The slaver wore leather armor, but of a disturbingly pale hue, and Krailash wondered what animal-or person-had given its skin to make that leather. He snatched the shackles from the slaver’s belt. “Do you speak a civilized tongue?”

  “Tongue is delicious,” it said in Common, speaking from lips tinged blue by cold. “Never had lizard tongue.” The slaver tittered.

  Krailash glanced around. The stone men had vanished, merging back into the walls. Two of his men, Ramsey and young Lukas, appeared to be dead. The others were being tended by Alaia, who was quietly praising their bravery. He pointed to Morris and Hemingwood, the two who seemed least harmed and said, “You, watch the other tunnels. We don’t want to be surprised again.” Returning his attention to the derro, he said, “Do you want to live? Or do you want to end up like your fellows here?”

  The derro shrugged, ice crystals showering from its shoulders, seemingly indifferent to the death all around it. The creature actually yawned, and its breath was all mushroom reek and carrion stink. Krailash struck it across the face with one of his great mailed hands, and the derro spun and fell to the ground, breaking the tendrils of ice that held it to the tunnel. The derro rose, still tittering, blood running down its face from a broken nose. “Are you my father? He used to hit me just exactly the same way.”

  “I want to know where you take the slaves you capture,” Krailash said.

  “Did you lose a little boy? We didn’t even have to hunt him. He came here and fell in a hole. Like a gift from above for the Slime King.”

  Krailash wondered if that was some dark deity, or a title taken by whatever crazed monster led the derro, or something else, but it didn’t really matter. “I will have him back,” he said. “Or I will destroy every member of your filthy race. Do you understand? Does that penetrate your lunacy? You haven’t taken some jungle-dwelling savage this time. You’ve stolen someone with powerful friends.”

  The derro’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “A valuable slave then. Our savants will be pleased. Perhaps they’ll send you little pieces of him on feast days.”

  Krailash took the creature’s tiny neck in his fist, but didn’t squeeze. Not yet. Withholding that pressure was difficult, but Krailash was a being of iron will. “I will crush the life out of you.”

  The creature shrugged again. “You aren’t above in the bright day now, lizard-man. You’re in our world, in the dark, on the doorstep of the Far Realm. You will suffer. You will be consumed.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Krailash said, struck by an inspiration. “We have a psion who can pry open your mind and find all your secrets. We’ll know everything you know within the hour. We’ll just take you to the surface-”

  The derro began to flail so violently that Krailash almost lost his grip. Seizing the slaver by both arms-he wriggled like a live eel-Krailash grinned, showing his triangular teeth. The mention of the psion hadn’t frightened the creature. But the mention of the surface … “The sun is very bright up there, you know. In the jungle? It is merciless, and bright, and the sky goes on forever.”

  “It’s night now,” the creature whispered, its eyes wide. “I’ve been to the surface before. I go to steal people away. It doesn’t frighten me.” The creature’s trembling gave the lie to that.

  “But you go at night, don’t you? In the hours before dawn. And you always scurry back to your hole before the sun comes up. Have you ever seen the sun? It’s a great eye of fire in the sky. I can cut off your eyelids and stake you out on the ground so you have to stare up at the sun.”

  “No!”

  Krailash shrugged. “Once my psion empties your mind, why not? As good a way as any to dispose of trash like you.”

  The derro closed its terrible eyes. “I can take you. To the slave pens.”

  “You can, and you will,” Krailash said, and bound the slaver’s hands with its own iron shackles.

  When Alaia and his remaining four men were ready to move again, Krailash nudged the derro with his boot. “Lead us,” he said. The derro showed him a trapdoor in the floor, and Krailash managed the tricky feat of descending an impossibly long ladder above a shackled prisoner held on a chain leash. The rest of the party followed him down, the spirit boar flickering and reappearing at the bottom of the shaft.

  “Which way?” Krailash said when the path at the end of the shaft dead-ended at a corridor running off to the left and right.

  “Left,” the derro said. “Nothing the other way but pit traps and grell.”

  Krailash had spent many years in dungeons during his youth, and he had no fondness for either of those things, assuming they really waited down that tunnel. He wished the psion-what was her name? — were here. Her kind could sense a lie. “If you’re not telling the truth, the rest of your life will be very short, but it will also be so unpleasant that you’ll wish it was even shorter.”

  The derro shrugged and inclined its head to the left. Krailash nodded. “Men, two of you in front of me. Alaia, if you’d stay behind me. And two more men to cover the rear.”

  They walked in silence, Krailash’s head brushing the low ceiling. Eventually the derro stopped, nodding to a patch of porous orange stone. “Wormrock. Practically alive. Grows fast, so we use it to hide our passages. We just need to dig through here.”

  Krailash frowned. “If you brought Julen this way, then surely it hasn’t had time to grow back yet.”

  The derro tittered. “He went right. Fell in a pit trap. That’s how they caught him. But this is the fastest way to the pens. We might even beat him there. Wouldn’t that be nice for you? Get there before they decide whether to eat him or make him a mushroom farmer or give him to the Slime King as a toy?”

  Krailash gestured. “Cayley, Fallon, Morris, Hemingwood-break through this rock.” The guards, all seasoned men who’d served with Krailash for years, obligingly stepped forward and hacked with their hand axes. The wormrock crumbled easily, leaving behind negligible piles of dust, and it wasn’t long before they’d chopped their way through into another tunnel, that one vast, easily seventy feet wide, roughly-gouged and streaked with dark black and red patches that Krailash wanted to believe was some cave lichen, but which looked much more like ancient dried blood. “What is this place?” Krailash said.

  “We call it the Causeway,” the slaver said, and tittered. “It’s the cause of no end of trouble. Some great monster crawled through here, clawing its way through the rock, in the long long ago. Left a path so wide and broad and clear that fools think it’s safe.”

  Another titter, and Krailash cuffed him on the side of the head.

  “Just lead.”

  They followed the Causeway for more than an hour, the passage angled steeply down all the while. The derro muttered about all the things that might kill them, and no number of cuffs to the ear or hissed orders could make it shut up for long. The sense of impending danger was so intense that Krailash began wishing something would attack them, just to break the tension. Spending too much time in the dark could make one go mad, Krailash thought. No wonder the derro were insane.

  “Welcome to the depths,” the slaver said at one point, and giggled. “No more simple Upperdark for you. No basements or mineshafts or quarries or pitiful surface scratchings in the earth, no, no. We’re two miles down, at least, and some of the things that live here think the sun and stars are just stories told to frighten children. Can you feel the wonderful weight of all that stone above us?”

  “Shut up,” Kra
ilash growled.

  Finally, after another long period of silent trudging and tense watchfulness, their prisoner pointed to a dark mouth of stone off to one side. “There. That’s the passageway.”

  The hole was narrow enough that Krailash wasn’t sure he’d make it through without a pickaxe to widen the way, but by twisting his shoulders, he shoved his body through. He dragged the derro in after him by its chain, and pushed it to the front. The others filed in and gaped around. They were in a cavern obviously carved over centuries by long-gone flowing water. Bulging crystals emerged from the walls, some of them glowing with faint purplish light, and towering stalagmites rose from the floor. The party continued into the cavern for a while, and the slaver got more and more agitated as they went. “This way, this way!” The derro bounced on its heels, so eager to move forward that Krailash immediately feared an ambush, and tugged its chain, drawing it up short.

  “There’s something strange about this one,” Alaia said, squinting at one of the stalagmites, far larger than the others they’d passed. “I don’t think it’s made of stone. It seems to be … How strange. Helmets, and rusting swords, and a cart wheel, and the belly of a wood stove, held together with something sticky, like sap. Something made this.”

  A distant noise impinged on Krailash’s consciousness. The Underdark was not a very quiet place, really: the echo of footsteps reverberated hugely; there were rumbles of distant earthquakes or, more likely, creatures burrowing all around them; and the constant trickle and drip and roar of subterranean water was a rising and falling background hum. But the new sound was not like any of those: it was a buzz, like a swarm of small insects close by your head.

  Or a swarm of very large insects rather farther away.

  He jerked the tittering derro’s chain. “What is this place?”

  “You’ll know soon enough,” it said. “It’s a swordwing nest.”

  Krailash stared at the hideous prisoner. He’d never encountered a swordwing, but he’d once adventured with a dwarf named Halbert Hammerfist who had. The dwarf liked to boast of how his party had broken through the wall of a dungeon into a cavern and found it alive with hideous flying monsters. They’d slain the creatures, and found their nest, which was filled with treasures and relics looted from a thousand murders. Upon further questioning, the dwarf had gloomily admitted that everyone else in his party had died within moments of the swordwings’ initial attack, and that he himself had survived only by expending a wish he’d been granted by a djinn. Hammerfist had carried an axe with a viciously serrated blade he’d fashioned from the arm of one of the swordwings, and that blade had lent credence to his otherwise improbable description of the monsters. Human-sized insects with four immense wings each, bodies covered in chitinous armor of razored spikes, with limbs that were living weapons, capable of slicing a man in two right through his armor. Darting so fast in flight that they seemed to teleport-it was possible they did teleport-and attacking in coordinated teams, they were death on the wing, and the dwarf reckoned they were the most dangerous things he’d ever encountered in a lifetime of adventuring aboveground and below.

  “Swordwings,” Krailash said, and shook the derro. “Are you mad? We’ll all die! You too!”

  “Yes,” the derro said placidly. “But I’ll die down here in the dark where I’m supposed to, not under some horrible sun.”

  Krailash lifted his head as the sound of buzzing intensified, and started to shout a retreat, but then the derro looped its leash-chain around Krailash’s throat and began trying to strangle him to death.

  Chapter Thirteen

  What struck Julen the most profoundly was how dark the Underdark wasn’t. Oh, at first it had been all shadow and mineshafts and abyssal depths, and his captors didn’t bother with torches or sunrods, but in the past hour he’d counted at least four separate kinds of natural illumination: glowing fungus; crystals lit with an inner light; patches of shining cave wall that must be the glowstone he’d read about; and disgusting, many-legged insects, big as mice, that swarmed over especially damp portions of the caverns and glowed like fireflies, but larger. As they descended ever deeper, Julen began to think the areas of absolute darkness were rarer than those in which there was some form of light. True, none of those lights were bright enough to read by, or even to tie your bootlaces by, but when deprived of light for too long, the human eye could make great use of even the faintest illumination, and with effort could turn a candle into a lantern and a lantern into a sun.

  Not that he much liked what he saw. The two derro dragging him along were remarkably boring captors-they’d even stopped singing. They’d paused once, in what Julen sensed was a dark immense cavern, and barked harsh phrases into the air, to no response that Julen could discern. Perhaps they’d been negotiating with some crawling horror, or just reassuring sentries that they were friend not foe. From there they’d moved into gradually better-lit passages, and he’d determined that they were shorter than himself, and thinner, wearing filthy and scuffed leather armor, armed with chain whips, and with dirty white shocks of hair. He couldn’t speak to their facial features because they hadn’t once turned to look at him. That was good, since he was still leaving chalk marks for Zaltys to follow, but it was hard not to feel like a sentient sack of potatoes. Julen was considering-not seriously, but just as a thought experiment-trying to escape, just to make something happen, when the two derro stopped at a place where two tunnels branched off in separate directions.

  This particular bit of cavern, a chamber the size of Alaia’s wagon, was aswarm with those greenish glowing bugs, and Julen’s body crushed the ones that didn’t scurry away fast enough as he was dragged along. When their bodies burst, the smell was foul, and he would have gagged, but that would have meant opening his mouth, and the possibility of one of these insects crawling over his tongue was too horrific to contemplate.

  One of the derro crouched, grabbed one of the bugs, and took a bite out of it as if chomping into an apple. He chewed, flat long face almost thoughtful, as green fluid ran down into his filthy beard. After a moment he gestured, negligiently, toward the leftmost of the two tunnels that opened off the bug-filled space.

  “Too slow,” the other derro said, in perfectly comprehensible Common. “Other way’s faster.”

  The bug-eater responded in the thudding, sonorous tones that Julen assumed were Deep Speech, and gestured more forcefully.

  His companion sneered. “Don’t care. I’m not afraid. I’m hungry.”

  Bug-eater offered his handful of leaking, still-twitching insect, and the argumentative derro slapped it away. “I want meat that screams. Meat that can ask me not to eat it.”

  The bug-eater gestured to Julen, who had never imagined that such a casual wave of the hand could make his bowels clench and his muscles tense and the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

  “Nah. Young, strong, better for other things. Slime King wouldn’t like it if we ate him.”

  Bug-eater shrugged, pointed to the leftmost tunnel, and said something else in Deep Speech.

  “Fine, but I’ll get there faster, and I’ll have the slave, and you’ll just have bug juice on your face, ha!”

  That argument did not dissuade Bug-eater, who headed into the tunnel and vanished from sight. The last derro grunted and pulled on Julen’s chain, dragging him, seemingly effortlessly, toward the other tunnel-which was, fortunately, almost entirely insect-free.

  Just one of them now, Julen thought. Could he take just one of them? Yes, he was bound, but he was also Guardian trained, and there were things a man could do even trussed up like a pig for a holiday dinner-not many things, admittedly, and none of them obviously useful in his situation, but it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. As they passed into the darkness of the new, narrow tunnel, Julen decided to try talking first, perhaps lull his captor into a sense of security, maybe even get his bonds loosened. “If you untied these chains a little, I could walk, and you wouldn’t have to pull me.”

 
The derro didn’t answer.

  “Look, I know you can understand me, I heard you talking. Your accent is atrocious, but we can communicate. Why not talk with me?”

  “Speaking meat is my favorite meat,” the derro said, but as if musing aloud, not talking to Julen at all. “Sometimes it talks even while you’re eating it, if you start eating it at the right place.” The derro was almost shouting, because the sound of running water, a distant constant background noise until then, had grown closer and louder.

  Julen raised his voice too. “Look, then, just to pass the time, just a conversation, what can that hurt? Tell me, why didn’t your friend want to go this way? And why did you kill the other one, the one who was talking about labyrinths?”

  “But eventually it stops speaking and it just becomes meat and sometimes that’s better. Sometimes I don’t like to hear anyone talking but me, because nobody else says anything worth hearing, no one else says anything any better than what meat says.” The derro gave an especially vicious jerk of the chain. “Down we go, chattering meat. Watch yourself. This is the fast way.”

  The derro hurled Julen into a fast-rushing channel of icy water that thundered inexorably down. The shock of cold, and the desperate attempt to roll over to get his face out of the water and save himself from drowning, drove all thought from Julen’s head. The derro jumped in after him, still gripping the chain, and they rode the slick, narrow channel of water down through pure blackness. I can’t mark my passage, he thought, and indeed, the chalk had been dashed from his grasping fingers when the derro flung him into the water. No one will ever find me, and I’ll never find my way out.

  On the plus side, the luminescent bug guts staining his leathers were washed away.