Tim Pratt: Venom in Her Veins

Hard to blame her, when a day spent gathering flowers would eventually translate to enough gold to buy a small house in town or a large farm in the country.

Marley nodded and set off, the infant nuzzled against him, chin resting on his shoulder. The child’s green eyes seemed to look straight at Krailash, but it was surely coincidence-as he understood it, infant humans were appallingly nearsighted, lacking the keen vision every dragonborn had at birth, lost in a world of blurs and light.

“After you,” Rainer said, and Krailash grunted, looking away from the child to the path broken in the jungle brush. He walked slowly, axe in his hands, trying to make sense of the trail sign, but he was no ranger. Should have called for the head of the caravan scouts. All he could tell was that a great many people had passed this way, some resisting that passage violently. The path was big enough for Rainer to walk beside him, and they moved in silence for a long distance, the jungle gradually closing back over them from the relative openness around the ruined courtyard. Whoever had attacked the child’s tribe hadn’t attempted to cover the tracks of their departure at all, which suggested either stupidity or confidence.

Rainer tripped over a stone and swore. That stone was the first of many-they were back in the ruins, among the rubble and fragments of vine-encrusted walls. Colorful snakes slithered away from the path as they approached, which could mean there were yuan-ti nearby-the serpentfolk tended to attract snakes-or it could mean nothing at all. The jungle was full of slithering things.

The path was harder to follow in the ruins, since there was no longer a pathway of broken and crushed vegetation, but some of the prisoners had been bleeding, and spots of blood left something of a trail. They picked their way over the stones and over broken bits of statuary until they reached a relatively intact wall that butted up against a huge doorway: two massive, weathered stone slabs standing upright, with a third slab laid across the top. The structure still had a roof, though it was damaged and pocked with gaping holes. Anything could be waiting inside.

“Well,” Rainer said, voice pitched low. “Do we go in?”

Krailash listened intently, but didn’t hear any signs of life inside. He knew from bitter experience that prisoners, even cowed ones, weren’t usually silent-there were sobs, whimpers from injuries, fierce whispers. “I will go in,” he said at last. “You wait here, to make sure no one ambushes us from outside.”

“Yes sir.” Rainer lifted his sword, a tight grin on his face.

Krailash stepped through an archway wide enough that he couldn’t have touched both sides with his arms out-retched, and into what might once have been a temple. The carvings on the wall were relatively well-preserved, and they looked like the work of yuan-ti, all twining serpents and fangs and a many-headed snake he recognized as one aspect of Zehir, a god of poison, darkness, and treachery. Krailash, like most dragonborn, valued honor above all else, and this vile deity of the snakemen was abhorrent to him. He was glad their settlement had crumbled so far, but sorry they still persisted at all.

He took a step forward, eyes adjusting to the dimness just in time to stop him from plunging into the pit that filled the center of the temple.

At first, Krailash assumed the ten-foot-wide hole was part of some dark ceremonial function of the yuan-ti temple, who were said to keep pits of snakes and to hold their venerated monsters underground to receive sacrifices, but a moment of study showed him the chasm in the floor was actually evidence of some catastrophe. The edges were cracked and ragged, stones heaved up and statuary toppled on the edges, with only impenetrable darkness within. Was it a sinkhole, or …?

No. There was a single bright drop of blood on the edge of the pit. The prisoners had been led here and taken down into the dark. Perhaps not yuan-ti slavers at all, then, but something worse: some subterranean dwellers from the Underdark, the vast system of caverns, tunnels, lightless seas, underground rivers, and hidden cities that legend said formed a savage world beneath the world. Yuan-ti certainly weren’t the only creatures with fangs in their mouths. Krailash shivered. Despite his reptilian appearance, he was as warm-blooded as any human, and the thought of innocents dragged into those lightless depths by savage drow, or brutish kuo-toa, or fouler races he’d never heard of, chilled his blood and troubled his heart.

Well. He wouldn’t be going down there . But he could do something about this particular doorway to the depths-

He heard something from outside, a dull thud that could have been a falling stone from the ruins, or something more ominous. “Rainer!” he shouted, and then looked uneasily at the hole in the floor, wondering if his voice would call attention to whatever lived within. The other guard didn’t answer, and Krailash hurried for the entryway, emerging into the light to find Rainer gone, his sword on the ground. A faint shout gave him a direction to follow, and he ran deeper around the side of the temple where he found another crack in the earth, this one smaller, but opening on the same black depths.

Rainer’s helmet rested, upside-down, on the edge of the pit.

Whatever had stolen the child’s village away had stolen Rainer too. And it was Krailash’s fault for coming alone, and not bringing sufficient support. He considered leaping into the dark, roaring and swinging his axe, but Rainer had been a capable fighter too, and that hadn’t helped him. The enemy could be using poison, traps, ambush, anything. Rainer’s loss was a blow, but the safety of the caravan was paramount. With a last look around-the jungle could hide almost anything-Krailash set off for the caravan at a run. He needed help to neutralize this threat.

Loath as he was to admit it, he needed magic. Magic could accomplish in moments what it would take twenty men with shovels and picks a tenday to do.

Krailash stopped by the harvesting operation to assuage his worry that the whole party had been kidnapped by dwellers from the Underdark, but everything there was business as usual, the workers carefully plucking petals from the terrible, beautiful flowers and putting them away in baskets. “Where are Rainer and Marley?” one of the guards asked, but Krailash ignored him, barked orders to pull the harvesting detail back to the caravan, and led the way. The trip to the camp didn’t take long, but to Krailash, it felt like the march of a thousand miles through hostile territory in wartime. When they reached the camp, he finally allowed himself a deep exhalation of relief. The perimeter was marked with wooden posts topped by faintly-pulsing purple and red crystals that their wizard, Quelamia, assured him would keep the mindless jungle beasts away, and his sentries were on the lookout for other dangers. Krailash hurried past the paddock where the oxen were contentedly munching their feed and producing copious quantities of manure-fortunately upwind of the camp proper-and hailed his guardsmen. “Tell Alaia I need a moment of her time,” Krailash said, and a messenger dashed away.

The war-wagons were arrayed in the camp’s outer ring, with bowmen on guard in each, and four of Quelamia’s apprentices spread out, each armed with a rod enchanted to throw fireballs or spit lightning or spawn freezing winds. Inside the defensive ring were the tents of the soldiers, and inside that, those of the laborers and the cook wagons. At the very center stood three wagons that were, essentially, houses on wheels. The smallest was Krailash’s, an unassuming wooden box on wheels with arrowslit windows; the armor reinforcements didn’t show.