Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

She decided to go looking for Krailash, but she found Julen along the way, squatting in the shadow of a supply cart, an array of glittering bits of metal spread out on a cloth before him. Zaltys crouched down beside him, though she stayed out of the shade. Unlike most of the other people in camp, she didn’t mind the heat of the sun pounding down on the clearing. “What’s all this?”

“Lockpicks,” he said, holding up a narrow twist of black metal and squinting at it. “I had to leave home in a hurry, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget anything.” He sighed. “Not that there are any locks worth speaking of to practice on out here. What with the general lack of doors . My skills are going to get all rusty out here in the wilderness. I don’t know how I’ll pass my practical exam this fall. At least I’ll be able to keep up with my poisons and knife-throwing-no end of nasty creatures out here to kill, at least. And I’m sure I’ll be bitten by dozens of horrible animals, which can’t hurt in developing my resistance to poisons. Did you know in the Guardians we eat tiny amounts of poison for breakfast every day, to build up immunities? We’re supposed to carry a ridiculous array of antidotes and anti-venoms with us too. I must say, I prefer the bits of the job that involve knives.” He rolled up the cloth of lockpicks and tucked it away in a small traveler’s pack.

“You Guardians and your toys,” Zaltys said, shaking her head.

He snorted. “This from a woman with a clutch of magical arrows in her quiver?”

She laughed. “Where have you been keeping yourself all day?”

Julen looked around, then beckoned her closer. Zaltys obligingly leaned in. “I was belly-down on the roof of your mother’s wagon, my ear right next to the chimney, eavesdropping,” he said.

Zaltys widened her eyes. “You were spying on my mother ?”

Her cousin had the good grace to look sheepish, but only for a moment. Then he frowned. “That’s what the Guardians do . We listen to things we aren’t supposed to overhear. We gather secrets.”

“Spying on your own family, Julen, that’s low.”

“Ah. So you don’t want to know what I found out then?”

Zaltys settled down beside him, leaning against a cartwheel. “Well. I didn’t say that . They were talking about Rainer?”

“They were,” he said. “And talking with Rainer too.” Julen played with a thick silver coin, walking it across the backs of his fingers, making it appear and disappear. He really did have agile hands. The Guardians had to practice their skills just as much as Zaltys had to practice archery, she supposed. “I don’t know. I think the man might be mad. He said he escaped the place where he was imprisoned, and wandered lost in the tunnels for a while, until a snake led him to the surface.”

Zaltys grunted. “That’s unusually helpful, for a snake.”

“Yes. I think he probably hallucinated the snake, but who knows? He didn’t make much sense at first, but then …” He frowned. “Someone talked to him. I can’t remember who.”

Glory , Zaltys thought.

“Anyway, after that, he got more lucid, was able to answer questions, explain what happened to him. Zaltys, did you know he held you in his arms when you were just an infant?”

She blinked. “Rainer? He was one of the guards who found me? But why didn’t my mother tell me that? Or introduce me to him?”

Julen shrugged. “I’m not sure. I don’t really understand it. The day Rainer was taken by slavers-it was the same day they found you.”

“You’re sure?”

“That’s what he said. ‘After we found the baby, they dragged me down.’ ”

“I wonder if the slavers who took him were the same creatures who killed my village?” Zaltys said.

“Ah. They … Zaltys, the story I always heard was that you were found among the dead, the only survivor of a massacre.”

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. No one liked to talk to Zaltys much about the day she’d been found, saying it was a sad and tragic time, but she’d managed to extract that much information from them: that she was the sole survivor of a murdered village.

Julen shook his head. “But that’s not what Rainer said . He was telling them what happened, and he started with the day he was taken, and there was nothing about finding any other bodies. He and Krailash heard you cry out in the jungle, and they went to investigate, and found you in the ruins, but no one else. There were bloodstains on the stones, and the teeth of monsters broken and scattered on the ground, but your people weren’t massacred. They were enslaved, Rainer says. Taken by the same creatures who took him .”

Zaltys shook her head. “No, that’s not … That’s not how it happened, that’s not what they told me. Julen, I’ve visited the grave site, it’s this great heap of dirt and stone, they buried my whole village in a pit.”

“People lie, Zaltys,” Julen said gently. “Serrats more than most, maybe.”

“But why ? Why tell me my family was dead?”

“Maybe it was easier?” Julen said. “Kinder? To let you think they were dead, instead of down there, in the Underdark. With the derro. Rainer and Krailash were making sure the slavers were gone, and when Rainer got separated from Krailash for a moment, the harvesters sprang on him from a crack in the ground, bound him with shackles, and pulled him into the caverns below.”

“Derro,” Zaltys whispered. She’d heard of them, of course, but they were a bogeyman, a threat, moon-white underdwellers said to hide in dark basements and enslave disobedient children, who would be forced into an eternity of shoveling coal into hellish furnaces if they didn’t attend their etiquette lessons or failed to address a family elder with proper respect. She hadn’t really considered that they might be real . “If he … wait … did Rainer see my family down there?”

“He didn’t say. And your mother didn’t ask, at least, not that I heard. Rainer said there were other human slaves, though, along with snake people, bullywugs, kuo-toa, and creatures he couldn’t identify. The slaves labored in mushroom fields, harvesting food, and were used as live bait to catch horrible blind fish the derro like to eat, and sent in to do war against the enemies of the derro, which are, I gather, everyone in the world. Rainer says the creatures are mad, and coming from someone as broken up as he is, that’s saying something. He said he saw horrible things in the service of the derro.” Julen shook his head. “They fought the servants of gods whose names have been forgotten by the surface world. Living pools of blood. Creatures with wings like razors. Beholders. Purple worms, and once, a purple dragon. He finally saw a chance to escape in a recent battle, hid in the tunnels, and started following a snake because he had no other idea where to go. The snake led him to fresh air, and a crack in the rock, and once he reached the surface, he wandered until he found some river that leads to a waterfall-”

“Shattered Rainbow Falls,” Zaltys murmured. “It’s a day’s walk, but it’s beautiful there.”

“Yes. From there, he knew the way to the caravan site, and that’s how he found us.”

Zaltys stood, swaying a little from the hard wind of the revelations Julen had brought. “But if Rainer survived all these years, then my family might still be alive down there. In the dark. In thrall to monsters. If that’s true, family is the most important thing. It’s the one thing in this world I know to be true, family is everything .” She shook her head. “But he’s probably just crazy. I’m sure his mind is a mess, he must be misremembering, it was nearly twenty years ago, after all. What if he’s just mad? Mistaken?”