Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“Well?” she said, and Krailash looked her over. She was rather regal in the garment, and the stars seemed almost to twinkle.

“You look like a magic user, all right,” he said.

“Oh good. Stab me?”

Krailash sighed, took a dagger from his belt, and pressed the point very gently against the sleeve of the gown. “Feel anything?”

“Pressure. No pinprick. Give me a slash.”

Krailash swung the knife, at an angle shallow enough that it wouldn’t cause much damage beyond shaving off a bit of skin if it got through. But the blade bounced off as if he’d struck boiled leather. “Won’t do you much good if a boulder falls on you, but it will afford some protection. Do you think you can crawl around on hands and knees in it if need be?”

“Without even scraping my knees,” she said. “Nice thing about magical robes-they tend to adjust to fit. All right, now that I’ve held everyone up, let’s get moving.”

When they came back to the false gravesite, the hole was big enough for the whole party to descend. Krailash sent three men ahead, then himself, then Alaia, and the last three men in the back. They were all well-provisioned and well-armed. Krailash began to regret bringing his great battle-axe Thunder’s Edge when they entered the old mining tunnel, because it would be impossible to swing with any power in such confined space, especially with his allies pressed in so close.

“Wait,” Alaia said, and the company halted. “My spirit companion is just up ahead, in a sort of nexus room connecting many of these tunnels, and it senses movement.” Her eyes widened. “Derro! They’re coming in from all sides, they’re going to-”

The guard at the front of the tunnel screamed as dozens of crossbow bolts struck him simultaneously, his death cry a counterpoint to the demented giggling of the onrushing derro attackers.

Julen woke up with entirely too much understanding. There was no blissful moment of confusion, no disorientation, no instant when he thought he might be having a terrible nightmare. His years of training at the hands of the Guardians had made such self-delusions impossible, and when consciousness returned to him, he knew exactly what was happening.

He’d fallen into a pit, and been drugged and captured by derro slavers, and his future would either be very short and very unpleasant, or very long and indescribably more unpleasant. The heavy metal shackles binding his ankles were attached to similar cuffs around his wrists, the two sets of restraints joined by short chains, forcing his knees into a drawn-up position. He lay on his left side, curled body scraping painfully against the rough tunnel floor as his captors dragged him by a long chain attached to the shackles. There was precious little to see, as the tunnel was dark, and the derro apparently had no need for light. They weren’t giggling, but they were talking to themselves, in guttural tones that must have been Deep Speech, along with occasional fragments of Common, words that made no sense out of context and probably didn’t make much sense anyway: “melon,” “candlelight,” “fencepost,” “dung,” “matrimony.”

The histories he’d read all said derro were mad, but that only made them more dangerous. His father had taken him to an asylum once, to see a man who’d killed fourteen respectable women in Delzimmer before being captured. That man had chatted amiably with voices only he could hear, and claimed to take his murderous instructions from a neighbor’s pet wolfhound-the wolfhound had been examined, and was determined to be an ordinary dog, not a lycanthrope or demon in disguise or anything else unusual, and certainly nothing capable of controlling a man’s mind. The killer had, unquestionably, been insane, but he’d eluded the authorities for months, carefully laying false trails that pointed blame toward his imaginary enemies, and his booby-trapped basement lair had taken the lives of a dozen city guards before he was apprehended. His father had told him all that, and said, “You see, Julen, madness doesn’t mean stupidity. The mad can be clever and cunning-sometimes even wise-and because their motivations are often impossible for sane men to comprehend, they are almost impossible to predict and troublesome to manipulate. Some like to employ the mad as assassins or enforcers or ultimate threats, but I advise against it. If such measures seem necessary, invest in a skilled actor who can pretend to madness. Actors are easily manipulated, especially by the lever of vanity, and often have the sort of moral flexibility that proves useful in our operatives.”

The derro weren’t actors. They were twisted beings, despised even by the other races in the Underdark, tainted by their dark researches and assignations with aberrations, and they couldn’t be bribed, or begged, or outsmarted, or reasoned with, which limited his diplomatic options. Trying to kill the mad was also troublesome, as they often fought on happily when sane people would have given in to the inevitability of death. The situation wasn’t hopeless-the Guardians held that almost no situation was-but it was certainly dire. Escaping from the derro was the main priority.

Julen examined the shackles as best he could by feel, probing for the lock with his fingertips, because he’d been lockpicking since he was old enough to hold a burglar’s tools. But there was no lock, and as he shifted, the metal grew warm and contracted, squeezing his hands and ankles more tightly. Magic, then. That was problematic. He wondered if the green knife in his pack could help, but one of the derro must have taken it. The dagger at his belt was also gone, but the throwing knives were still hidden in his sleeves. No help now, in this bump-and-drag situation, but of potential use later.

There was something else up his sleeve: the piece of pale blue chalk he’d found in his pack. He’d secreted it there with some idea of marking their descent through this labyrinth so they could find their way up again.

“It’s not a labyrinth,” the derro dragging him said in an unsteady, high-pitched voice, like a drunken child’s. “Common mistake. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has only a single path. It’s a circuitous path, takes a long time to traverse, and there are lots of twists and turns, but there are no branch paths, no moments of choice, no dead ends-you can’t get lost in a labyrinth, you can just get bored . A labyrinth is a means of meditation, or a way to make a minotaur’s mealtime more entertaining for the watchers. But this, this is no labyrinth. There are paths here with a thousand branches, that all end in death. It’s more like a maze, though not one of your silly garden mazes with hedges. This is a maze that spreads out front and back and to and fro and up and down, all bridges and pits and overs and unders. You can’t map it because there are things here that eat maps and maps that eat mapmakers and things that eat appetites.” The voice lapsed into silence.

After a long moment, Julen said, “You can read minds?” That seemed the only answer, unless Julen had been muttering about labyrinths aloud, and he was fairly sure he hadn’t fallen that far from the heights of his Guardian training.

“What? No one can read minds. There are no minds to read except mine, because mine is the only real mind, and none of you things that pretend to have minds can possibly read a mind like mine.” There was a sound of a scuffle, and the derro who’d spoken squawked in pain. The relentlessly scraping forward motion stopped, and the chains holding Julen went slack. He considered trying to escape, but he would have had to crab-scuttle along the tunnel, and he wouldn’t have made it far, even if the derro were apparently fighting among themselves.