Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“No people?” Julen said. “None of your, ah, original family?”

Zaltys shrugged. “There are tribes of halflings, but I’m a bit tall to pass for one of those.” She grinned. “Quelamia thinks my people were either a very small, unknown tribe, or maybe just refugees who fled the upheavals and ended up living in the jungle for a while. They didn’t last long, I guess. Certainly they didn’t leave much of a mark.”

“Who, or what, do you think …?” He looked away.

“Killed my family?” She kept her voice light. “Hard to say. Could be any number of things. Krailash found me crying among the trees, the only one left alive, so I don’t know who killed the others. I don’t guess it matters. Dead is dead.”

“Huh,” Julen said.

Zaltys knew she was somewhat notorious in the family, so it was understandable that he was curious about her origins. At least he’d become more polite-when they’d been young children playing together he’d once stared at her intently and blurted out, “Why come you’re so brown ?” Adoptees weren’t unheard of, and were even considered to strengthen the family by bringing in fresh blood-for one thing, they could marry their cousins without a greater-than-usual risk of bearing idiot children-but hers was certainly the most unusual adoption in recent memory. The only other truly colorful adoptee still living was her great-uncle Gustavus, a lycanthrope that the Guardians had adopted in hopes of using him to frighten rivals; everyone was surprised when he showed an aptitude for bookkeeping instead, and they’d sent him to the Traders in exchange for a pair of sociopathic twins boys with no affinity for retail who’d later perished in a trade war with the Longspear cartel in Chavyondat. “Sorry,” Julen said. “I don’t mean to stir up bad memories, or …”

“I was an infant when they found me, Cousin. I don’t have any memories from that time. As far as memories go, I’ve been in the family as long as you have, and I’ve never known another life. I’m curious about my people, of course, but … they’re all gone. I’m just lucky I have a new family to call my own.”

“We’re happy to have you, Cousin,” Julen said, a little awkwardly. Then he sighed. “Even if you do have a bizarre fondness for sleeping without a roof overhead.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Zaltys said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Julen replied.

The caravan proceeded. Julen was in no danger of surpassing Zaltys’s skill as a ranger, but she had to admit that, interbranch family rivalry aside, the Guardians knew how to train their operatives. He pinned a platter-sized spider to a tree with a throwing knife-smirking at Zaltys and saying, “See, I have ranged weapons too,”-and helped her and the other forward scouts slash down a carnivorous vine that had grown across the barely-visible caravan path, showing no hesitation even when the bloodlike sap sprayed everywhere. He was clearly better suited to creeping through alleys, but he was adapting fairly well to the jungle environment.

“It’s not so different from the city in terms of sight-lines,” he mused as they ranged off to one side of the path to make sure there were no lurking hazards waiting to ambush the caravan. The trees there weren’t as big as elsewhere in the jungle, but that meant more sunlight could filter down, and as a result the jungle’s fecundity was explosive, with smaller trees and plants growing so close together Zaltys sometimes had to turn sideways to slip between the trunks. “Down in the oldest part of the city especially, the houses are built so close together the alleyways are too tiny for grown humans to pass through at all, and the streets curve and twist, limiting your sight-lines. There are places where the roofs overlap, blocking out the sun.” He glanced up at the green canopy above. “Of course, in the alleys, the worst you have to worry about is a mugger, not-I don’t know-giant flesh-devouring beetles.”

“The beetles aren’t so bad,” Zaltys said, pushing aside a low hanging branch and its freight of poisonous white flowers.

“Oh? So what’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to face out here, then?” Julen said.

Zaltys considered. “It’s hard to say. Deeper in the jungle you’ll want to keep an eye on the trees above you as well as the ground below. There are apes who’ll drop down from above and start pummeling you-we’ve even seen a few wearing fragments of old armor, guards of some abandoned ruin or another, I guess. They killed four of our scouts a few years ago. Krailash says there used to be yuan-ti near the prime terazul harvesting location, but he hasn’t seen any of them in years, and I’ve never seen one, myself. Lots of snakes, but no snake people. I’m sure there are worse things farther from the caravan path-chokers, drakes, trolls and goblins, who knows, maybe even a dragon-but most thinking creatures learned to avoid this route long before I was born. Between mother, Krailash, Quelamia, and Glory, we’re a lot more formidable than just about anything we’re likely to encounter among the trees. All we get are the mindless creatures, blood-sucking vines and giant spiders and the like. It’s a shame. It would be nice to have a challenge.”

“Really?” he said, hacking at a thorn-encrusted vine. “And I was just thinking it would be nice to have a hot bath.” He paused. “Who’s Glory?”

The next tenday proceeded well, with Julen’s presence the only notable difference from the previous year’s excursion. Zaltys did her best to ignore the guards that followed her whenever she went into the woods, and rotated through the various scout groups, paying close attention to what the more experienced rangers and huntsmen and reconnaissance experts did, picking up a few fine points of tracking and teaching the basics to Julen, who continued to complain in a relatively good-natured way. One night after dinner-eaten with the guards, fortunately, as mother had given up her attempts at formal dining after that first night-Julen confided to her that learning naturecraft was no more boring than learning the list of approved poisons, and that struck Zaltys as high praise, coming from him.

They had lessons too, which Julen found annoying at first-“I thought out in the wilderness I could avoid tutors ”-but he obviously enjoyed the weapons training with Krailash, though he sometimes fell asleep during Quelamia’s monotone recitations of ancient historical fact. Glory, who’d long ago declared Zaltys hopeless at psionics, pronounced the same verdict on Julen, and settled down to teaching them what she could : which was mostly how to get your way by sweet-talking and manipulation, and how to subtly steer people toward a desirable course of action, and how to make people do what you wanted while making them think a given course was their own idea. After one such lesson-an especially bawdy one, complete with illustrative anecdotes about an emperor brought low by the machinations of one of his own councilors combined with his fondness for lovers of an inappropriate social class-Julen said, “They should bring her in to lecture to the Guardians!”

“They do ,” Zaltys said, amused. “Every year. You just don’t remember her, though you remember the lessons, I’m sure.”

“Don’t remember who?” he said.

The caravan did not move swiftly, because it was a large operation, and took time to break camp in the morning and set up in the late afternoon. They couldn’t streamline things much, because the deeper they got into the jungle, the more important it was to have proper defenses set up before nightfall, when the jungle came alive with menacing noises and the things making those noises. They also took a somewhat meandering route, and sent trailbreakers to hack false paths through the jungle (ideally leading to profoundly dangerous dead ends), and spent time covering their own tracks, all in order to frustrate the spies and followers they assumed were tracing their trail.