by Tim Pratt
“No one sees the king while the king is the king,” Zaltys said. “I think we’re okay, assuming we can get upstairs without being killed. I wish we could kick this whole mess of greenery into the water, but it would be like trying to kick an orchard. I wonder if my mother left you the knife? It seems a bit primal, but I can’t imagine she’d have let you come down here if she’d known what we had planned.”
“We’ll ask her when we make it to the surface again.” They walked around the pool and unlatched the heavy wooden door. The guards outside didn’t pay them any attention as they emerged. Presumably the sentries were meant to keep people from going in, and had very little interest in whether anyone came out. The savant who’d led them downstairs was still on the ground, possibly dead, though the robe of eyes was gone. Her skin, pale as curdled milk, was covered in strange tattoos, also of eyes, but they were all closed, lids and long lashes drawn down.
Zaltys and Julen stepped over her gingerly and went up the stairs. They reached the hall of miniature kingdoms and tried not to look into them, but a voice called from the first one they passed. “Humans!” it shouted, and they looked in to see Bug-eater seated in an ornate (if chipped) gilded throne, his feet propped on a dead derro he’d arranged into a sort of corpse foot stool. “Was your meeting with the Slime King all you’d hoped?”
“Very informative,” Zaltys said. “Have you renounced your vow of incomprehensibility?”
“I am the lord of all I survey, excepting the hallway,” he said, “and so it behooves me to make myself understood. Would you like to come in for dinner? There’s a crack in the wall swarming with beetles. They taste a bit like gecko and a bit like bat and a bit like human.”
“Thank you. Perhaps another time.” Zaltys gave him a little bow, which Julen hastily copied, and Bug-eater waved at them in lofty dismissal.
An array of screams and grunts and the scrape of metal on bone emerged from the other rooms, but none of the other little kings called out to them as they went past. They ascended the far staircase without incident and emerged into the grand museum hall, which was strangely deserted. As they hurried among the exhibits, they saw why. One of the portals to the Far Realm, near the forge, was birthing a monstrosity of lashing tentacles, and all available derro had gone to man the nets to drag it down.
“If Iskara reveres things from that place so much, why does she capture them?” Julen said.
Zaltys shook her head. “I think Iskara is after something bigger. She mentioned something the size of a world with eyes. And she seemed to have contempt for these other aberrations. Didn’t you tell me aboleths are possibly the oldest things in the universe?”
“So I’ve read. Do you think Iskara’s just insane? That she’s trying to open portals for something that doesn’t even exist?”
“Maybe,” Zaltys said. “But it’s not something I’d care to risk. I wish there was a way we could close these portals. It’s a shame they didn’t close when you killed Iskara.”
Julen frowned. “Did I kill her, though? She was wrapped up in vines, yes, but is that enough to kill something as old and powerful as she seems to be? Or did we just trap her?”
“That’s a happy thought,” Zaltys said. “Let’s hurry and free the slaves and get out of here before we find out whether’s she’s dead or only inconvenienced.”
“All right, we’re probably looking for something near the mushroom fields, but those were vast, they fill almost this whole cavern, so where do we start-”
The pale snake came slithering down the steps, curled around Zaltys’s feet, and looked up at her. Zaltys stared at it.
“Ah,” Julen said after a moment. “Are you talking to the snake?”
“No,” Zaltys said. “I can’t do that, as far as I know. I’m just thinking. Trying to figure out whose pawn I am, exactly, and how I can be sure the next move I make is my own.” She flicked her fingertips at the snake. “Go on then. Show me the way to my family, or go away forever.”
The snake lowered its head and began undulating across the square, and Zaltys and Julen followed.
“I don’t understand,” Krailash said, staring at the portal, and the terazul vines. “The plants-they come from another plane?”
“A plane so alien that just a glimpse of it strips sanity from the mind like corpse beetles tearing flesh from a dead body,” Alaia said. She was sitting on the ground, and her spirit companion appeared to be asleep, two things that made Krailash profoundly uneasy. “And we’ve been selling people potions and powders made from a flower rooted in that plane. The visions people have when they take terazul tinctures, the energy and strength they feel when they ingest the powders, the madness that certain addicts fall into-the ones we call weak, the ones we’re so careful to blame for their own downfall-they’re all gifts of horrors from the Far Realm. What if the vines aren’t plants at all? What if they’re the tentacles of some ancient slumbering creature drifting through the infinite layers of the Far Realm, and the flowers are something like hairs, or warts, or fingernails? What if we’re strengthening the power of aberrations in this world?” Alaia drew her fingers down her cheeks, so hard her fingernails drew blood, so it appeared she was shedding red tears. “What have I done, Krailash? I’m a shaman. Defender of nature, servant of the primal world and peddler of poisons from a place inimical to everything I thought I believed in.”
“I’ll chop through the vines,” Krailash said, lifting Thunder’s Edge, though practically speaking, the problem was more difficult than that. The portal through which the plants emerged hovered near the cavern wall some twenty feet up, and he wasn’t sure he could climb that high, as the wall was distressingly smooth.
“No,” Alaia said sharply. “Kill those vines, and you reduce our family’s fortunes by half at a single stroke. If word got back that I was responsible for the loss of supply, everyone in my family would turn against me. I would be stripped of my position, and even my name, shunned and exiled. You know family is everything to me, Krailash-you can’t do this. And with no terazul, there’s no need for Travelers. What would become of you?”
Krailash shook his head. “But you said it yourself, they’re from the Far Realm-we can’t let them continue to poison the world!”
“There’s the world,” Alaia said, with a small shrug. She reached out and touched her spirit companion’s head, and seemed to address her next words to the boar. “And there’s family. I’m a Serrat. I will always choose family.”
Her spirit companion stood up, looked at her with wide-eyed sorrow, and shook its gray head. The spirit boar took a step, and then another, and seemed to walk out of reality enitrely, leaving no trace behind. The shimmering curtain of sparkles and shadows that covered them abruptly dissolved. “Alaia,” Krailash whispered. “What happened?”
She shrugged again. “I made a choice. As a shaman, I am a defender of the natural world from outsiders and aberrations-shamans exist, in part, to combat the influence of the Far Realm. If I can’t do that, if I choose not to do that, how can I be a shaman? It’s a good thing I’m incomprehensibly wealthy and a skilled administrator, because I’m not a shaman anymore.”
“What do you mean? The primal world has forsaken you?”
Alaia laughed bitterly. “The primal world doesn’t notice me, it’s not conscious, it’s just power. But …” She made a sad grasping motion with her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers. “Now that power is like smoke. I can still sense it, but it’s receding, and when I try to let the power flow through me, it slips through my fingers. I think I’ve forsaken it. In truth, it’s been harder and harder to access my abilities with every passing year. Too much time spent in cities. Too much time putting things other than the fate of the world and nature itself first.” She shook her head. “And now it’s all gone. If we’re going to get out of here alive, it will be based on your strength as a warrior.”
Krailash stood between Alaia and the field of mushrooms, because as they were no longer magically hidden, it was on
ly a matter of time before an overseer noticed them.
“Or will you turn on me too, as my power has?” Alaia said. “Have I shown you the true face of my avarice, and disgusted you?”
“I made an oath when I came to work with you, to serve the Serrat family, specifically the Travelers, specifically you. Dragonborn stand by their oaths. I was always disgusted by the family business-though I admit, thinking you were mere drug peddlers was better than knowing you were unwitting pawns of the Far Realm. What if those flowers are doing more than poisoning people-what if they’re poisoning reality? Part of some effort to annex our world to that plane of madness? I have heard the stories your family tries to keep quiet, about the children of addicts born dead, and deformed-”
“Children of drunkards are sometimes stillborn, or born twisted too,” Alaia said, but without much conviction.
“The children of drunks are never born with tentacles,” Krailash said levelly. “But you misunderstand me. I made oaths, and I stand by them. I will still serve you, despite everything.”
“You’re a good friend, Krailash.”
He shook his head. “A good friend would try to talk you out of this, Alaia, and convince you to kill those flowers. No. I’m a terrible friend. But I’m an exceptionally good employee. Should we look for Zaltys’s people? She might be with them.”
Alaia didn’t get up from the ground. “Zaltys doesn’t have any people, Krailash. Not human ones, anyway. She’s not a woman-she’s a yuan-ti. Her village was a cult of snake people. She just looks like a human. I don’t know why. Maybe she’s a mythical chosen one, born once every ten generations. Or maybe she’s a throwback to humanoid stock in the yuan-ti bloodline. I always wanted to believe the latter. But ever since you met that god, I’ve been afraid it’s the former.”
Krailash lowered his guard long enough to stare at her. “But … You mean Zaltys is a spy?”
“No, I mean her family are yuan-ti. She was just an infant when they were taken, and she was raised as a human-as far as she knows she is human, unless she was unlucky enough to find the yuan-ti slaves and learn otherwise. I just hope they can’t sense their own, and that they won’t recognize her as one of them.”
“But she could have been tainted by Zehir,” Krailash said, horrified by the thought. He’d taught Zaltys to fight, hunt, stalk, kill-and she was a snakeman? Had he given the weapons that might kill him to one of his enemies? “The cultists of Zehir and Sseth are subtle, Alaia, you’ve never had to fight with them, but I have-”
“Our psion Glory checked out her mind thoroughly,” Alaia snapped. “Zaltys is my daughter, and you’re sworn to defend her too. You’re so ridiculous on this subject-it’s why we wipe your mind every time you find out.”
Krailash gaped. “I-you’ve tampered with my mind?”
Alaia gave him a thin smile. “Just a little. All legal, of course. Read your contract. When you signed, you gave us permission to protect vital family secrets-and the fact that Zaltys is yuan-ti is one of them.”
Krailash wanted to swing his axe at her: at Alaia, the woman he’d worked for and joked with for three decades, the woman he would have called his closest friend, even minutes ago. He let Thunder’s Edge sag loose in his hands. “You didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth about Zaltys? Of course it’s a shock to hear, but I’m sure in time I would have gotten used to it.”
“I didn’t want to risk that you’d forget your oath and try to kill her, Krailash. Though I depend on you, and trust you, and care for you. Zaltys is my daughter. I never wanted to hurt you-that’s why I had Glory wipe your memories-but I had to keep my daughter safe. I needed you to keep her safe, and I didn’t know if you could continue to do that, if you knew the truth about her.”
Krailash couldn’t decide whether to walk away, or attack the nearest derro overseer, or lunge at Alaia. The conflicting demands of honor, pride, dignity, and duty pulled him in different directions, and paralyzed him.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to make a decision. He heard shouting, and when he looked toward the slave pens, he saw Zaltys-looking dirty, and disheveled, but human-running his way, trailed closely by Julen.
His training had him on his feet and racing in her direction before he had a moment to think. He was a protector, and Zaltys and Julen were in need of protection, because they were being pursued by a horror his eyes could not quite comprehend.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Zaltys and Julen were all the way across the square when they heard the shout: “Stop them!” Though they probably shouldn’t have, they paused long enough to look back. At first, Julen thought some kind of forest monster was pursuing them, perhaps one of the ambulatory and minimally self-aware conglomerations of carnivorous vines that waylaid travelers in the jungle. But as the green figure stumbled down the steps, fragments of greenery tearing away and fluttering behind, he realized it was Iraska. Shouldn’t have pulled out the knife, he thought, but he’d done so automatically-you didn’t leave a perfectly good knife sticking in a dead body. You could never tell when you’d need another blade, especially a magical one.
The Slime King was bloody and her robes were frayed. The vines weren’t coming away easily; they were taking chunks of flesh and fabric with them-but she was alive, and her phantom tentacles were lashing in the air. Most of the derro in the settlement were still busy subduing the creature that had crawled out of the portal, but she’d brought two blindfolded guards with her and, worse, all the little sovereigns and some of their creations, including the quaggoth with the eyes of a beholder wavering on stalks. One of those eyes emitted a reddish light, and the facade of bones on a low building near Julen and Zaltys burst into flames.
“Zaltys, vanish, save yourself!” he shouted, but she just grabbed his hand and pulled him along after her. She’d managed to hide him in her shadow once before, but she couldn’t take him with her if she stepped through shadows to escape, and she was apparently unwilling to go without him. That was very thoughtful of her, though it was also a trifle suicidal. They dodged among the buildings as the crowd of derro and their furious Slime King pursued them, and sooner than Julen expected they’d burst out among the mushroom fields. The derro behind them were gaining, and the overseers in the field were staring at them in surprise, so Julen dropped his pack to lose the weight and make himself run faster-he had his weapons with him, and losing his food and drinking water and lockpicks didn’t rank among his current worries. He pulled his hand away from Zaltys and ran toward the field of mushrooms, shouting “Split up!” and hoping they could at least reduce the number of pursuers after each of them.
“No!” Zaltys shouted, and pointed toward the long low cages made of pale wood-the slave pens, obviously.
Dedication to family is all well and good, he thought, but I’d rather be alive than noble. But he couldn’t very well yell that sentiment, and who knew, maybe if they freed the slaves they could escape themselves in the ensuing confusion. Assuming the slaves weren’t all too cowed or drugged to bother causing any confusion.
“Mother!” Zaltys shouted, and Julen thought, Aren’t we a bit old to be calling for mommy? Then Zaltys shouted “Krailash! You heard me call! You came!” and Julen realized she was calling to people there in the cavern-Krailash was there, holding his great battle-axe, and Alaia was there too, though her ever-present dire boar spirit companion was nowhere to be seen. Julen began to grin. The Slime King was formidable, certainly, but Alaia was one of the most powerful shamans in the region, and shamans lived to destroy unnatural things like Iraska had become. He wondered what she would do-summon giant bears to eat their enemies? Call up a wind to strip the flesh from Iraska’s old bones? Summon a priory of ghost panthers to slash and bite and claw?
But she didn’t do anything. She just stood there, staring at Zaltys. And Zaltys veered off course, running to one of the cages. There were eight or ten creatures inside, roughly human-sized, and all more or less snakelike. Some had the lower bodies of serpents, while others had ar
ms and legs, but all had the heads of snakes-as essentially reptilian creatures, they didn’t look so terribly different from Krailash, except for the absence of frills on the cheeks and ears, and the fact that they mostly lacked legs. They stared at Zaltys in confusion as she started smashing at the bars of their cage with her magical bow. It was no way to treat such a weapon-bows weren’t clubs, and could be easily broken-but then, it was a magical bow, and you could probably use it to smash down a brick wall without breaking the back or the belly or even spoiling the curve. Still, it was surprising to see Zaltys use her bow that way, when she wouldn’t even risk damaging it by leaving it strung, but desperation did strange things to a person.
Krailash rushed toward Zaltys, holding his axe high, and for a moment, Julen thought, He’s realized she’s yuan-ti, he’s going to kill her! But instead, Krailash grabbed her, swung her around behind him as easily as Julen would have moved a kitten, and then struck the cage with Thunder’s Edge. The bars splintered and shattered at the first blow, and the yuan-ti started to slither hesitantly out.
Julen looked behind him, and Iraska and her terrible retinue were very close, kicking up spores as they charged through the mushroom fields toward them. He drew his green knife again, hoping he wouldn’t need to use it, still waiting for Alaia to do something suitably shamanic and conflict-ending. Krailash took a stance between the onrushing horde and the members of the Serrat family he was sworn to protect, and the freed yuan-ti-knowing a good thing when they saw it-hurried behind him as well. The other slaves in the pens, kuo-toa and quaggoths and bullywugs and who knew what else, all chattered and screamed and shouted and croaked and pleaded for freedom. Zaltys stepped beside Krailash, her magical bow in her hands, her woefully underfilled quiver of arrows hanging from her shoulder. “For family!” she shouted, and nocked an arrow.
