Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

After he’d killed half a dozen, the weapon in his hands began to hum, its old and unreliable enchantment coming to life. Krailash grinned. The axe’s magic only manifested when it was well soaked in blood-or, apparently, the black slime swordwings had in place of blood-but that was, after all, usually when Krailash needed it most. The axe was sometimes called Thunder’s Edge, and he swung it in a hard, flat arc in the direction of a group of hovering swordwings. The blade didn’t touch them-they were too far away-but a wave of concussive force flew from the axe and sent them tumbling through the air and smashing into their fellows.

Being in the heat of battle again after so long working as, essentially, an exterminator killing jungle vermin, was a thrill. But he knew death was inevitable. His men were dead or dying, Krailash himself was bleeding from dozens of cuts on his hands and head and tail-the portions not well protected by armor-and the swordwings kept coming, flickering through space in an unnatural way, as numerous as bees in a hive, and as indifferent to the death of their fellows. He would make them pay well for his death, but he could not deprive them of it. His only regret was that Alaia, Zaltys, and Julen-members of the family he was honor-sworn to protect-might not make it out of the horrible world underground.

Suddenly, the cavern filled with snakes: huge, coiling, spectral. Their bodies passed through Krailash, suffusing him with strange energies. Suddenly he could move with the speed of a striking snake, and he redoubled his efforts to drive back the swordwings-and after a few moments, his whirling axe found nothing to bite. The swordwings were occupied fighting the surging snakes that roiled all around. They might have been only spirits, but where their jaws closed, the swordwings were devoured or snapped in two, and there seemed as many snakes as enemies.

Krailash paused, dazed, and then Alaia touched his arm. “Come on!” she shouted, and rushed toward the place where they’d entered the cavern. He looked around for his men, but the snakes had appeared too late to help any of them, and all were lost-Cayley’s head nearly severed by a swordwing’s strike, Hemingwood facedown and unmoving surrounded by the limbs of enemies, Fallon transfixed by a spear jutting from a tower of junk, Morris’s upper body some feet away from his lower half. Krailash muttered a brief thanks, in case their spirits lingered, and then hurried after Alaia. The agility the spirits had given him was sufficient to allow him to sprint, quite a trick given the weight of his armor.

They made their way through the crack in the wall where the treacherous derro had led them away from the Causeway. “Stand back,” Krailash growled, facing the crack in the wall. Thunder’s Edge still hummed in his hands, and he swung, aiming its destructive force at the stone before them. The wall collapsed in a pile of black stones, sealing the entryway.

Krailash sagged to his knees, the spirit strength draining away, his injuries catching up with him. “Never seen anything like that before,” he murmured.

“I’d never done it before,” Alaia said, touching his arm. “Probably the second most powerful magic I know. My teacher called it the Sea of Serpents.” She shook her head. “I don’t much like snakes, even if they aren’t real snakes, exactly.”

“Those snakes saved your life,” Krailash said.

“Both of our lives,” she corrected.

“I’m not so sure,” the dragonborn said. He closed his eyes, sinking into a warm and enveloping inner blackness that no weapon he’d ever studied could combat.

Julen had heard drowning was actually a very peaceful way to die, second only to dying of exposure in a snowstorm, where, as he understood it, the snow actually began to feel soothing and warm, and you simply dropped off to a sleep from which you never awoke.

He’d never actually seen snow, so he couldn’t speak to the pleasantness or unpleasantness of such a death, but he felt quite qualified to state that drowning was, in fact, a truly horrible way to die. Drowning while chained with no possibility of saving oneself through heroic physical effort was even worse for being more psychologically debilitating. Drowning, while chained, in the crushing blackness of the Underdark, while also failing to help the cousin you were in love with, seemed to him perhaps the worst way to die of all.

He tried to hold his breath at first, of course, hoping the derro would save him somehow. Julen was supposed to be a slave, after all, a valuable commodity, and letting him die in a pool of water seemed irresponsible. It was certainly bad business. Julen thought fleetingly that a member of the Traders would never allow such wastage, which was a point in their favor. But derro were mad. Maybe his captor had drowned as well, or simply been distracted by a passing prey animal or a shiny stone, and forgotten all about his prisoner.

Holding his breath was hard, because the shock of hitting the icy water had driven the air from his lungs, and he felt the need to suck in air almost immediately. After what seemed an hour but was probably no more than a minute, blackness began to creep into the edges of his vision. That surprised Julen, because the bottom of the pool was already black, utterly lightless, but there was a greater blackness encroaching. Then a new sensation began, like his chest being squeezed in the hands of a giant, and his eyes prickled and burned, and his brain felt hot in his skull.

And he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. He sucked in a breath, and water filled his nostrils and his throat.

After that it was actually rather peaceful, though only because he lost consciousness.

The peace didn’t last long. Someone struck him hard on the back and he vomited water, no longer ice cold, but warmed from being inside his body. Julen gagged, shuddered, and convulsed, the muscles of his abdomen clenching and unclenching painfully, and he stared at the puddle on the stones before him. He was on his belly, still chained, in a not-entirely-dark cavern, and he was alive, though he felt like he’d been turned inside out, and every breath was like a rasp being drawn across his innards.

“Good strong boy,” his derro captor said, and smacked him on the back again, hard. “You’ll make a good worker. You died a little there, I think. See anything interesting, in death? Any secrets? I like secrets.”

“A snake,” Julen said, remembering as he spoke. His voice was a serrated croak. He couldn’t think of any snake gods, though his aunt the shaman had mentioned a World Serpent once or twice, some kind of primal spirit, he gathered. Was that what he’d seen? It seemed rather darker than that. And insofar as he’d been able to read its expression, the creature had seemed amused by his death-a malicious pleasure, not wise understanding. The vision he’d seen was more like a snake made of shadows, not unlike the one Zaltys had killed and he’d skinned. Perhaps it was simply that snake’s ghost, waiting beyond death to take revenge on Julen’s own spirit. Happy thought.

The snake in his vision had been a lot larger than the shadow snake, though. And it had looked much smarter, and more hungry.

“Snake? Hmm.” The derro continued thumping him on the back, though less violently. “The serpent is a great symbol. Mythic ancestor of great heroes. Devourer and progenitor, cyclical manifestations, the transformation of death into life. Seer, healer, sea monster, tempter, death in the dark, worm with pretensions, keeper of earthly knowledge, wellspring of poison. A vision of snakes can mean almost anything.” He shrugged. “I was a savant once, before I was a slaver. My gift was to interpret the dreams of the Slime King. But the Slime King doesn’t sleep, so they gave me shackles and a whip and sent me to do useful work instead.” He jerked Julen’s chain and began dragging him again, around the perimeter of the dark pool. The light there came from red crystals, so faint they’d been invisible under the water, but bright enough to see by once he’d been saved.