Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“It’s possible,” Julen conceded. “But he sounded sane enough, once he calmed down, and one thing followed another in his story pretty clearly. We’ll probably never know.”

“No. I have to know. I need the truth,” she said.

Julen spread his hands. “How? If your mother and the others were lying to you, how can you trust anything they say if you confront them?”

She nodded. “You’re right. I can’t just ask. So I have to go look. I have to go find out if my original family is dead.”

“How do we do that? Investigate a crime almost two decades old?”

“It’s easy,” Zaltys said. “We do it with shovels .”

Julen leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow. Zaltys had waited until nightfall to sneak away and investigate, which had given Julen ample time to convince her to bring him along. “I wish someone had given you a magical earth-moving pickaxe for your initiation.”

“At least the shadow armor doesn’t get dirty,” Zaltys replied, driving the shovel down again. She stood in a hole so deep that only her shoulders and head were aboveground, and she was beginning to think she’d never find the thing she both hoped and dreaded to discover.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Julen looked around at the canted walls, the shattered stone, and the fragments of unsettling carvings.

“I asked, long ago, where my family and the rest of the village was buried. Krailash brought me to this place, and said Quelamia had covered over their grave with earth and stone by magic. They picked this ruined structure because it was so recognizable, and would be easy to find, if I ever wanted to see it. I come every year. I leave flowers. And now? I’m beginning to think there aren’t any bodies buried under here at all. And if there are no bodies …”

“Then this isn’t a grave. And Alaia has been lying to you. And that means your village wasn’t killed, but taken.” Julen drove down with his shovel-and then yelped. Zaltys snapped her head up to look at him, and saw the shovel handle vanish from his hands. A moment later Julen burst out of his own shoulder-deep hole and scrambled away. “Zaltys! I hit something, or, I mean, I hit nothing -I broke through into some kind of cavern, and, ah, the shovel fell in. Sorry. I was surprised, and lost my grip.”

“Come on,” Zaltys said, without hesitation. She grabbed his hand and dragged him away from the temple, into the dark jungle. There were things among the trees worthy of her fear, but the only fear she felt was for whatever might be in the caverns beneath what she’d always believed was her original family’s final resting place.

Quelamia hadn’t buried her kinsmen. She’d buried the entry to the Underdark the slavers had used to breach the surface.

Julen gasped, trying to keep up as Zaltys pulled him through the jungle. She ran swiftly, her night vision exceptional as always, and then it occurred to her to step into a shadow. A sudden sensation of cold, a blur in her vision, and an instant later she emerged from another shadow, farther away. “No fair!” Julen said. “Some of us are stuck using our feet!”

Zaltys waited for him to catch up, and resisted the urge to step through more shadows, at least until they reached the edge of camp. “Stay here,” she said, and stepped toward a shadow cast by one of the ever-burning perimeter torches.

Julen caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

She didn’t look at him, or at anything in particular; she looked inward. “To get food, and rope, and an everburning torch, and a few potions, and a sword, and-”

“You’re going into the caves?” he said. “Zaltys, you can’t . Rainer was a hardened warrior, and it nearly killed him.”

“If my family is down there-my real family-I have to save them.”

“We’re your real family, Zaltys. I am.”

Her bleakness receded for a moment, and she met his eyes. “Yes, Cousin. You are. But so are they. If family is everything, how can I leave my family trapped in the dark? Enslaved? Mother, father, maybe brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins ? I can’t.”

“Let’s talk to Krailash, then, organize a party, perhaps send a rider to bring back Rainer so he can tell us what to expect-”

“They’d never let me go down there tonight. They only just agreed to let me walk in the woods without an escort, Julen. They … it’s not their family, Julen. It’s mine. I have to do this.”

“At least wait until morning!” There was desperation in his voice.

“My family hasn’t seen a morning in seventeen years,” she said. “It’s always night in the Underdark.” She stepped into a shadow, and vanished from sight.

From the moment Julen first saw Zaltys in the camp, with her black hair pulled back from her face and tied up with a cord, dressed in dirty hunting leathers that couldn’t hide her trim and somehow sinuous shape, with those startlingly large, deep, intelligent green eyes and a little half-smile on her lips, Julen was lost. Oh, he’d admired her back in Delzimmer too, and of all the pretty cousins he’d looked on and fantasized about, she was foremost, but seeing her here, in her element, the longing for her had struck him like a physical blow to the chest. His initial attraction deepened into full infatution as he saw how she handled a bow and knife, observed her utter mastery of the jungle pathways, and sparred with her verbally. By the time the first tenday in the field was over, he’d decided Zaltys was the woman he wanted to marry.

Falling in love with anyone was a luxury generally denied to the family, and falling in love with such a close relative was ill-advised at best. But the restrictions on first-cousin relationships were waived when one member was an adoptee, and he could come up with sound strategic reasons to forge a fresh marriage bond between the Travelers and the Guardians of the family-perhaps even reasons his hardheaded father would concede. Of course the head of the Travelers spent half the year out in the field, a circumstance not conducive to marital harmony and one of the obvious reasons Alaia had never wed despite various close calls, but Julen was confident they could adapt to and overcome the difficulties of the circumstances. Assuming he could get Zaltys to look at him as anything other than her little cousin.

He was not even quite two years younger than her, and he was trying hard to make her laugh and impress her with his ability to avoid being eaten by giant spiders and carnivorous vines, but the most he’d gotten from her in terms of affection was a pat on the back and some ruffled hair. He still might have simply enjoyed and agonized in the frustrated bliss of being so close to the untouchable object of his affection, but the prospect of a summer spent insinuating his way into her affections suddenly seemed in danger. Of course Zaltys wanted to charge into the Underdark, despite her total ignorance of the realm and its dangers, to save some people she’d never met, just because they happened to be related by an accident of blood. Julen could have told her that birth parents weren’t so great-his own mother was essentially a work of art observed from afar, a beautifully-attired and impossibly distant matron who spent most of her time in her chambers with her lady’s maids, while his father was a more frequent and altogether more harrowing presence in his life. But Zaltys hadn’t given him the chance to make those arguments, nor would they have meant much to her anyway, he suspected.

When she vanished, leaving him alone on the edge of the camp, his first thought was to go to Alaia and warn her, but he knew Zaltys would perceive that as a betrayal, and it would ruin any chance he had of being more than a soft city boy in her eyes. He considered going to Krailash, in hopes of enlisting his help to intercept Zaltys and convince her not to do anything impulsive, but he knew the dragonborn would tell his mistress what her daughter had tried to do, so betrayal would still be an issue. Besides, Zaltys would be hard to hold, given the capabilities of the armor Quelamia had made for her, and she was the kind of person who would exert heroic effort to do something she’d been ordered not to do.