Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“Leave? No, no, that’s not likely.”

“Wait here, Julen, while I show them what we can do,” Zaltys said, and faded from sight like a shadow disappearing in the sun.

Wait here, Julen thought. Like I have any choice. It was a bold bluff, no mistaking. He was sure his admiration for his cousin’s bravery would be a great comfort to him if he died.

Zaltys reappeared a moment later on top of one of the spindly towers nearby, bow drawn, arrow unmistakably pointed at the savant, who’d finally stopped smiling. “This is a good sniper position,” Zaltys said. “If you had any sense, you’d have bowmen of your own posted here.”

“Yes, fine,” the savant said. “You can make yourself very nearly invisible in dim light. We’re all very impressed. But didn’t you notice my robe is covered with eyes ? I can see invisible things, girl, which might hamper your escape.”

“Oh,” Zaltys said, nonplussed but quickly recovering. “Not if I put an arrow through your eye, it wouldn’t.”

“A point,” the savant said. “Now come down from there. Don’t make me open a portal and drive you mad. Playing with your food is slightly less fun if the food’s too mentally distressed to realize it’s being eaten. I’ll take you to the Slime King. There may even be a reward in it for me, like getting to watch you be consumed by something with more eyes than tentacles and more tentacles than teeth. Asking to meet with the Slime King is like a fish asking to be hooked and gutted and worn like a hat.”

“You wear gutted fish like hats?” Julen asked.

“Only on Fish Day,” the savant said impatiently. “Now come down from there, archer.”

Zaltys faded from sight again, and reappeared beside Julen. Most of the guards wandered off when it became apparent there would be no immediate killing, but a couple of others trailed along as the savant led them toward the Collegium-including one with glowing green smears in his beard.

“I know you,” Julen said.

“Me too,” Zaltys said. “I tied you up and left you by a waterfall. No hard feelings?”

The derro grunted and said something in a strange language. The other guard said, “He’s taken a vow of incomprehensibility. He speaks Deep Speech to those who speak Common, Dwarvish to those who speak Elvish, like that.”

“But he spoke to me in my own language earlier,” Zaltys said.

The guard shook his head. “Impossible. Must have been someone else. We derro are nothing if not rigorously consistent.”

“So what did he say just now?” Julen asked.

The derro shrugged. “I respect his vow, so I choose not to understand him.”

“Oh.” Julen thought for a moment. “What’s Fish Day?”

“No idea,” the derro said. “Never heard of it. Savants are all lunatics if you ask me. So. Be honest. Are you the agents of Zhentarim here to kill the Slime King and allow me to ascend to the throne?”

“No,” Zaltys said carefully. “That’s not us.”

“Ah well. They’ll be along soon enough I’m sure. My sister’s skull, I keep it in my sleep-hole, it told me my time of glory is nearly here, and I just need to bide my time, so that’s me, here I am, I’m biding.”

Bug-eater said something and laughed.

“Truer words were never spoken,” the other derro said, and wandered off just as they reached the broad stone steps. The derro who’d been murdered in front of the Collegium earlier was completely naked, his clothes all stolen, and another derro in a filthy white apron crouched by his head and methodically shaved off his hair with a rust-speckled straight razor.

The inmates are running the asylum, Julen thought.

“The Slime King is quite deep in the chambers below,” the savant said, pausing between two massive pillars. “I can’t be responsible if you’re killed by anything along the way. Are you sure you don’t want to tell me your message?”

Zaltys shook her head.

The savant sighed. “Fine, then. Let’s go.”

Bug-eater said something that sounded as if it were meant to be reassuring, but followed up by pointing his crossbow at them meaningfully, so Zaltys and Julen went after the savant. “Welcome to the center of derro innovation and magical science,” she said. “Mind your step. Some of the puddles down here will melt your feet off and feast on the slurry left behind.”

Julen glanced down, instinctively looking for such deadly puddles, and noticed the pale snake was still with them, slithering along unnoticed in their wake. Definitely something strange going on there, but compared to the mysteries and oddities he’d encountered in recent days, it barely rated a mention.

"We’re following a snake,” Alaia said. “And as far as I can tell, it’s just a snake. I’m fairly well attuned to the primal whispers of the natural world, and they tell me: ordinary cave snake, lives on bugs and rodents, no particular intelligence.”

“And yet, you’d think a normal cave snake would want to avoid a heavily-armed dragonborn instead of behaving like a frisky kitten.” Krailash’s head moved in a constant side-to-side sweep, his senses alert for the possibility of ambush, with Alaia holding the sunrod aloft. They were back on the Causeway, a broad avenue of blood-smeared stone smashing straight as an arrow shaft through caverns large and small. The snake led them along at a steady but not punishing pace, and Alaia’s spirit boar acted as their forward scout.

“I doubt that snake’s afraid of us,” Alaia said. “If it lives down here it’s dodged significantly worse things. It’s probably just leading us to its favorite mouse hole.”

“I doubt that. A god set it on this path.” Krailash skirted one of the smears of dried blood.

“So you said. I believe in the gods, of course, but I’ve never had much use for them. I revere the wild, and the wild was here before most of the gods, and it will outlast them. It’s hard to imagine a god taking any interest in our situation, though, especially one as unpleasant as you describe.”

“You’ve never doubted one of my reports in the thirty years we’ve been together,” Krailash said mildly. “Is there a reason you doubt me now?”

She scowled. “All right. I believe you saw what you say you saw.” He started to object, and she held up her hand. “And I suppose I believe your interpretation of what you saw too. A god. A god who made a body out of snakes , who takes an interest in Zaltys, who loves secrets and whispers … I find the idea rather troubling. I don’t want to believe it. The implications are too disturbing. I want to believe you were deceived by some trickster creature, some lying Underdark denizen, a larva mage or a drow illusionist or something.”

“Not impossible,” Krailash said. “But we’re lost in the Underdark, and the snake, at least, gives us something to follow.”

“Last time we followed something down here it led us into a trap,” she grumbled.

The snake slithered toward the jagged opening of a tunnel leading off the Causeway. “A change of direction,” Krailash said. “A hopeful sign.”

“Mark my words, we’ll find nothing but a nest of newborn rats. Which might make a nice change from these trail rations. You could break your teeth on them.”

“Perhaps you could, but my teeth are of altogether stronger stuff.”

They stepped into a cavern spotted with blood, the floor scattered with bits of shredded flesh. Predators and prey of the Underdark had clashed there, and recently, but there was no sign of any living monsters.

Or so he thought at first. Something fluttered near the ceiling, and Krailish squinted upward, fearing they’d stumbled upon another swordwing. He’d expected the Underdark to be full of things that crawled and oozed and slithered; the presence of things that flew was even worse. But whatever the creature was, it wasn’t the size of a swordwing, and seemed more like a bobbing balloon with trailing tentacles.