by Tim Pratt
The derro above him giggled wildly, clearly delighting in the ride. After what seemed an eternity of spitting water and gasping for breath and trying to force his chained, contorted body to obey his instructions, things got even worse. Julen went airborne, flying into empty space. The presence of faint light from glowing red crystals on the new cavern walls gave him no comfort, because as he spun in empty air, the illumination allowed him to see what waited below: a vast pool of water, tinted the hue of blood by the crystals’ light.
Julen was a decent swimmer. But not when his ankles were bound to his wrists. He crashed down into the pool of subterranean water. Near-freezing wet blackness closed over him.
Then he began to drown.
Krailash reached behind him and grabbed the derro, plucking it from his back as effortlessly as he would pick a tick from a dog’s coat. The creature was a flailing, biting, snapping thing, but derro were small, so Krailash tore it loose and hurled it at the nearest of the descending shapes to emerge from the darkness overhead. The derro squawked as it struck the swordwing, but it was the last sound the slaver would ever make: the buzzing, man-sized flying monster sliced the derro apart with deft slashes of its chitinous, wickedly serrated limbs. Their heads were insectlike, eyes bulging and expressionless, and their mouthparts were complex and endlessly moving.
“Fall back!” Krailash shouted, and his men-terrified though they must have been at such alien horrors-formed a defensive wall of steel protecting Alaia and the path to the cavern entrance. The dragonborn rushed to Alaia’s side and said, “We’re all dead, unless you have a trick to get us out of this.”
“Keep me alive long enough to come up with something,” the shaman said levelly.
“Better if you just escape,” Krailash said, “while we fight them off. I can’t promise to hold them long.”
And then the swordwings were upon them. Krailash let himself fall into the battle state: he was no longer a thinking creature with a conscious mind, or hopes, or dreams. He was a machine that identified threats and killed them. Krailash worked through the techniques his long-ago teacher, an unusually soft-spoken half-orc who could split a bull’s skull with a casual swing of his great two-handed sword, had taught him. The battle-axe sang in Krailash’s hands, and his muscles sang too, as he stepped through the most advanced forms of assault he knew. The fangs of steel: a lunge to bloody one enemy, followed by a spin to smash another from the air. The skullcrusher: an overhand blow to make an enemy stumble in a daze, reeling and easy to finish off. The exorcism of steel, used to sever a swordwing’s lethal arm at the elbow, rather than making a human opponent drop his sword. One swordwing swung at him from above and behind with a blow so hard it staggered him to his knees, but the monster’s barbed arm got stuck in Krailash’s armor, trapping it, and the dragonborn swung his axe back in a movement that would have embedded the blade in his own spine if the swordwing hadn’t been there to catch the edge first. He shook off the clinging enemy and stepped into the vorpal tornado form, whirling and spinning and striking any swordwing that entered his deadly storm of steel, spraying icy breath to freeze them and make them fall from the air as he fought.
After he’d killed half a dozen, the weapon in his hands began to hum, its old and unreliable enchantment coming to life. Krailash grinned. The axe’s magic only manifested when it was well soaked in blood-or, apparently, the black slime swordwings had in place of blood-but that was, after all, usually when Krailash needed it most. The axe was sometimes called Thunder’s Edge, and he swung it in a hard, flat arc in the direction of a group of hovering swordwings. The blade didn’t touch them-they were too far away-but a wave of concussive force flew from the axe and sent them tumbling through the air and smashing into their fellows.
Being in the heat of battle again after so long working as, essentially, an exterminator killing jungle vermin, was a thrill. But he knew death was inevitable. His men were dead or dying, Krailash himself was bleeding from dozens of cuts on his hands and head and tail-the portions not well protected by armor-and the swordwings kept coming, flickering through space in an unnatural way, as numerous as bees in a hive, and as indifferent to the death of their fellows. He would make them pay well for his death, but he could not deprive them of it. His only regret was that Alaia, Zaltys, and Julen-members of the family he was honor-sworn to protect-might not make it out of the horrible world underground.
Suddenly, the cavern filled with snakes: huge, coiling, spectral. Their bodies passed through Krailash, suffusing him with strange energies. Suddenly he could move with the speed of a striking snake, and he redoubled his efforts to drive back the swordwings-and after a few moments, his whirling axe found nothing to bite. The swordwings were occupied fighting the surging snakes that roiled all around. They might have been only spirits, but where their jaws closed, the swordwings were devoured or snapped in two, and there seemed as many snakes as enemies.
Krailash paused, dazed, and then Alaia touched his arm. “Come on!” she shouted, and rushed toward the place where they’d entered the cavern. He looked around for his men, but the snakes had appeared too late to help any of them, and all were lost-Cayley’s head nearly severed by a swordwing’s strike, Hemingwood facedown and unmoving surrounded by the limbs of enemies, Fallon transfixed by a spear jutting from a tower of junk, Morris’s upper body some feet away from his lower half. Krailash muttered a brief thanks, in case their spirits lingered, and then hurried after Alaia. The agility the spirits had given him was sufficient to allow him to sprint, quite a trick given the weight of his armor.
They made their way through the crack in the wall where the treacherous derro had led them away from the Causeway. “Stand back,” Krailash growled, facing the crack in the wall. Thunder’s Edge still hummed in his hands, and he swung, aiming its destructive force at the stone before them. The wall collapsed in a pile of black stones, sealing the entryway.
Krailash sagged to his knees, the spirit strength draining away, his injuries catching up with him. “Never seen anything like that before,” he murmured.
“I’d never done it before,” Alaia said, touching his arm. “Probably the second most powerful magic I know. My teacher called it the Sea of Serpents.” She shook her head. “I don’t much like snakes, even if they aren’t real snakes, exactly.”
“Those snakes saved your life,” Krailash said.
“Both of our lives,” she corrected.
“I’m not so sure,” the dragonborn said. He closed his eyes, sinking into a warm and enveloping inner blackness that no weapon he’d ever studied could combat.
Chapter Fourteen
Julen had heard drowning was actually a very peaceful way to die, second only to dying of exposure in a snowstorm, where, as he understood it, the snow actually began to feel soothing and warm, and you simply dropped off to a sleep from which you never awoke.
He’d never actually seen snow, so he couldn’t speak to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of such a death, but he felt quite qualified to state that drowning was, in fact, a truly horrible way to die. Drowning while chained with no possibility of saving oneself through heroic physical effort was even worse for being more psychologically debilitating. Drowning, while chained, in the crushing blackness of the Underdark, while also failing to help the cousin you were in love with, seemed to him perhaps the worst way to die of all.
He tried to hold his breath at first, of course, hoping the derro would save him somehow. Julen was supposed to be a slave, after all, a valuable commodity, and letting him die in a pool of water seemed irresponsible. It was certainly bad business. Julen thought fleetingly that a member of the Traders would never allow such wastage, which was a point in their favor. But derro were mad. Maybe his captor had drowned as well, or simply been distracted by a passing prey animal or a shiny stone, and forgotten all about his prisoner.
Holding his breath was hard, because the shock of hitting the icy water had driven the air from his lungs, and he felt the need to suck in air almo
st immediately. After what seemed an hour but was probably no more than a minute, blackness began to creep into the edges of his vision. That surprised Julen, because the bottom of the pool was already black, utterly lightless, but there was a greater blackness encroaching. Then a new sensation began, like his chest being squeezed in the hands of a giant, and his eyes prickled and burned, and his brain felt hot in his skull.
And he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. He sucked in a breath, and water filled his nostrils and his throat.
After that it was actually rather peaceful, though only because he lost consciousness.
The peace didn’t last long. Someone struck him hard on the back and he vomited water, no longer ice cold, but warmed from being inside his body. Julen gagged, shuddered, and convulsed, the muscles of his abdomen clenching and unclenching painfully, and he stared at the puddle on the stones before him. He was on his belly, still chained, in a not-entirely-dark cavern, and he was alive, though he felt like he’d been turned inside out, and every breath was like a rasp being drawn across his innards.
“Good strong boy,” his derro captor said, and smacked him on the back again, hard. “You’ll make a good worker. You died a little there, I think. See anything interesting, in death? Any secrets? I like secrets.”
“A snake,” Julen said, remembering as he spoke. His voice was a serrated croak. He couldn’t think of any snake gods, though his aunt the shaman had mentioned a World Serpent once or twice, some kind of primal spirit, he gathered. Was that what he’d seen? It seemed rather darker than that. And insofar as he’d been able to read its expression, the creature had seemed amused by his death-a malicious pleasure, not wise understanding. The vision he’d seen was more like a snake made of shadows, not unlike the one Zaltys had killed and he’d skinned. Perhaps it was simply that snake’s ghost, waiting beyond death to take revenge on Julen’s own spirit. Happy thought.
The snake in his vision had been a lot larger than the shadow snake, though. And it had looked much smarter, and more hungry.
“Snake? Hmm.” The derro continued thumping him on the back, though less violently. “The serpent is a great symbol. Mythic ancestor of great heroes. Devourer and progenitor, cyclical manifestations, the transformation of death into life. Seer, healer, sea monster, tempter, death in the dark, worm with pretensions, keeper of earthly knowledge, wellspring of poison. A vision of snakes can mean almost anything.” He shrugged. “I was a savant once, before I was a slaver. My gift was to interpret the dreams of the Slime King. But the Slime King doesn’t sleep, so they gave me shackles and a whip and sent me to do useful work instead.” He jerked Julen’s chain and began dragging him again, around the perimeter of the dark pool. The light there came from red crystals, so faint they’d been invisible under the water, but bright enough to see by once he’d been saved.
Julen realized his path was totally obscured. Zaltys was an excellent tracker, but even she wouldn’t be able to trace his passage down a waterfall. He was well and truly trapped with the lunatic and his mad people. Death was almost literally the best thing he could hope for.
Then his captor sprouted an arrow from his throat, gurgled, and fell. “Zaltys!” Julen shouted, exalted.
But it wasn’t Zaltys that rose up from the pool’s black water, and when the derro’s corpse began moving, he realized it wasn’t an arrow that had killed his captor, but a harpoon-a harpoon being reeled toward the pool by its wielder, who watched Julen with huge, watery eyes.
Suddenly the derro, which at least looked vaguely human and sometimes spoke his language-even if they said things that didn’t make sense-didn’t seem so bad. The creature with the harpoon was joined by three others, emerging from the water silently.
“Kuo-toa,” Julen whispered. The drawings he’d seen in the books on the Underdark in the family library didn’t do the creatures justice. “Loathsome fish-things,” that was how they’d been described, and while they bore enough resemblance to ordinary fish to assure he’d never enjoy a seafood dinner ever again, they were as big as humans, with hands that could grip weapons, and fangs protruding from their jaws. The one with the harpoon pulled the derro into the pool-the same pool where Julen himself had so recently drowned. Those things had been underneath him? The pool must connect to some subterranean network of rivers traveled by the creatures. No wonder it was considered a dangerous route. Bug-eater had been wise to take the long way down. It was faster, and maybe even fun if you weren’t chained up when you went flying from the river into the pool, but you ran the risk of being captured by fish-monsters who worshiped unheard-of gods.
Zaltys was sufficiently energized by her successful massacre of the floating jellyfish monsters that she almost wanted to shout for the derro to come out and face her, thinking she could pretty easily put them down too, but good sense won out over suicidal self-confidence. She didn’t worry about the light of her sunrod, assuming that, by that point, she’d fallen so far behind Julen’s captors that there was little chance of running into them, and reluctant to plunge herself into darkness again. Light was hard to give up once she had it. She soon realized the sunrod wasn’t strictly necessary, though. Even beyond the reach of her light she could see patches of illumination as she wound through tunnels with her snake companion.
She’d heard stories of rangers who formed close bonds with animals-actual animals, not the spectral pig her mother could summon-but she’d never expected to pick up a pet against her will. Perhaps the snake just thought following her was a good survival strategy. Any predator they encountered would probably focus on Zaltys first, both because she was more obviously a threat and because her body would provide a lot more sustenance when eaten.
Zaltys eventually reached a cavern crawling with hideous fist-sized insects with green, glowing bodies. What could they possibly be feeding on? Probably better if she didn’t know. She kicked a few out of her way, and noticed the smushed remains of several bodies. Good. Even without chalk marks, it was clear someone had passed that way recently, probably being dragged. There were two tunnels leaving from the room, one heading left, one right. She peered into the dimness, and didn’t see much to choose between them. The drag-path through the crushed bodies looked like it bore right, but it was hard to say-at least two other humanoids had tromped around the fork in the path, killing their own bugs, and the surviving insects were rapidly trundling away with the bodies of their fallen, presumably for a nice snack rather than a proper burial, which further obscured the signs of passage.
She chose right, for no particular reason other than intuition, but didn’t have to go far to have her intuition proved wrong. The roar of water rose, and the light from her sunrod revealed that the tunnel narrowed and merged with a rushing stream of water-very nearly a river-which disappeared down a long slope and wound out of sight. Hard to imagine slavers going that way, even if they were mad.
She retraced her steps, the snake unperturbed by the change in direction, and went down the other tunnel. That one was rather twistier and more circuitous, no bigger than the narrow hallways in the servants’ quarters of the family villa back home, and though the slope was never terribly steep, she was certainly descending ever downward. There were no more chalk marks, which was worrisome. She rounded a curve and found a derro bent over at the waist, hands on his knees, vomiting noisily. The puddle on the floor had chunks of glowing green bug parts in it, and when he looked up at her, the derro’s white beard was streaked with luminous juices. His eyes, permanently wide anyway, widened farther. Zaltys was too close even to fire the hand crossbow, so she stepped forward, spun on the ball of her foot, and smashed him in the face with her elbow. The derro’s head snapped back and bashed against the stone wall, leaving him dazed long enough for Zaltys to sweep his feet out from under him. After he hit the floor, she snatched the iron shackles from his belt and snapped them onto his wrists, where they magically tightened.
But she had a problem. She could kill him, but something in her balked at murdering a humano
id that was unconscious and chained-the jellyfish-things might have had a rich culture and vast intellects, but they looked sufficiently inhuman that she hadn’t hesitated to slay them. The derro, on the other hand, looked almost like a child, and even knowing he was a sadistic cruel slave-taker who’d stolen her original family couldn’t sufficiently steel her to put a dagger in his eye. She could try to wake him up and force him to tell her where his people lived, as she’d originally planned, but knowing how mad the creatures were, how could she trust anything he said? If she just left him there, though, one of his brethren would surely discover him eventually and raise the alarm, and since she was in the caverns of the derro, they’d surely find her no matter how skilled she was at melting into shadow.
Better to stash him out of sight somewhere, so if he woke up, no one would find him for a while. Surely there was a useful dark hole she could stuff him into, even though he hadn’t seen any branch paths at all along the winding tunnel. Continuing forward was dangerous-what if he’d been part of a larger group that had moved on when he felt the need to empty his guts of bug meat? They might be back soon.
She sighed. She could think of one place to take him. After disarming the derro-and burdening herself with his weapons, so they wouldn’t be found littering the tunnel-she bound his bootlaces together to make a handle, and started dragging him by the feet behind her, back the way she’d come. The weight of the two packs she was carrying was bad enough, but she also had to drag someone who, though small, didn’t weigh that much less than she did. All those hours roaming the jungles were time well spent, and she was up to the physical task, but it was exhausting.
Looking back once, she saw the albino snake had climbed onto the derro’s chest and lay coiled there, apparently asleep. There was something profoundly odd about that animal.
