Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

Grell . The derro who’d led them to the swordwing hive had mentioned such things: blind floating hunters bearing barbed tentacles. Krailash was a melee fighter, but he would have given much for a javelin or a bow or even a sling; the creature was beyond the range of his axe, even if he made a great leap. He exhaled his icy breath upward, hoping to stun the creature and make it fall to the ground, where he could make short work of it with Thunder’s Edge. But the creature floated aside with surprising agility, and Krailash’s breath just limned a few stalactites in frost.

“Krailash, what-” Alaia said, but then a great pain burst in his head, and black flowers blossomed in his vision, and he fell to his knees. His mouth filled with the taste of copper and rotten meat, and Alaia was shouting but he couldn’t answer, he couldn’t understand, there was something in his mind-

He stood up, though not because he willed it. His vision took on a reddish tinge. The grell is controlling me, he thought, terrified, as he raised his axe. He tried to fling the weapon away, but the effort was futile. Gods, the horrors of the Underdark were unending. He tried to tell Alaia to run. Even with her powers, he might be able to strike her down, especially because she was looking at him with concern, asking if he was all right. She hadn’t noticed the grell floating high in the cavern like a puppetmaster pulling Krailash’s strings. If she didn’t try to defend herself, he could split her in two with one blow of Thunder’s Edge, and what greater horror could there be for one such as himself, who held honor sacred above all else? To murder the woman he’d spent the past three decades trying to protect?

Krailash raised his axe high.

“This is the center of derro learning and civilization,” the savant said, “So it goes without saying, it is the most learned and civilized place in the world.”

Bug-eater said something cheerful and began pointing to various objects, grunting as he gestured: the world’s worst tour guide.

Zaltys didn’t spend much time in museums back home; she preferred exploring ruins in the wild to seeing fragments of ruins neatly brushed clean and mounted in glass display cases. She’d only been to Delzimmer’s centers of art and history once or twice, and this place was similar, though there was usually less blood on the floor of the museums back home. Beyond the pillars of the front steps was a wide, open area punctuated by low stone display pedestals, holding an astonishing array of strange bric-a-brac, with derro savants in robes strolling around, peering at the exhibits, and scratching on wax tablets with styluses. The savant bustled them along fairly rapidly, so Zaltys couldn’t look at any of the exhibits too closely, which was probably a blessing.

They passed a messy pile of gems, with clods of earth clinging to their shining facets; a scale replica of the Collegium itself made entirely of neatly stacked and balanced coins-probably looted from surface-world slaves, and worthless as currency there; and a petrified dragon’s egg as big as a derro, with various incomprehensible signs and sigils scratched into its surface-either mystical writing or graffiti, Zaltys wasn’t sure.

But the most striking exhibits were the exemplars of various Underdark races, taxidermied specimens dressed in the bloody remnants of their own armor (if they were races that wore clothes) and standing in lifelike-and usually warlike-poses on their pedestals. They passed a kuo-toa clutching its harpoon, and one of the jellyfish things Julen had called grell dangled from the ceiling on wires. Julen murmured the names of the ones she didn’t recognize: A bullywug leaning on its spear. A myconid with its helmetlike mushroom-cap head, holding a club of gnarled, hardened fungus. A swordwing with one of its arms and one of its wings missing. A beholder, not resting on a pedestal but jammed on top of a pointed stick, so from a distance it appeared to float, its eyestalks drooping and blind. An illithid, its long brown robes rather charred, its horrible mouth-tentacles singed as well. Something even Julen didn’t recognize, a humanoid figure with its skin flayed away, bits of armor fused directly to its exposed muscles, holding a whip made of linked spinal vertebrae, the jutting bone spurs sharpened to spikes.

As they passed that one, Zaltys saw its eyes move in its immobilized face, tracking her, and she realized it wasn’t dead and stuffed but somehow alive and petrified, frozen in stasis by magic and made into a living statue. Zaltys shuddered. The creature was horrifying, yes, but no monster deserved a fate like that . How many of the other exhibits had been alive too, and she simply hadn’t noticed? What kind of creatures could create a museum like this?

Zaltys had come into the Underdark to rescue any of her family that survived. That remained her mission. But if possible, she would also flush the derro out of the bowels of the earth as well.

“From this angle you can see the face of the aboleth,” the savant said, and pointed up.

Zaltys and Julen tilted their heads back. Julen gasped, and Zaltys let out a low whistle. An eel-like shape, thirty feet long and dangling tentacles and whiskers and shredded fins, was suspended from the ceiling by metal chains, and from their position, near the back of the central chamber, they could indeed see its face if one could call it a face, with those vertically-aligned, dead eyes, that lip-less mouth, those whiskers the thickness of a man’s leg.

“An aboleth,” Julen said. “They’re supposed to be the most fearsome creatures in all of the Underdark.”

“Nonsense,” the derro savant said briskly. “You’re thinking of the derro. Though that particular aboleth was a sort of honorary derro for a while-it used to be Slime King.”

Julen glanced at Zaltys, licked his lips, and said, “Is the current Slime King also an aboleth?”

“The Slime King is derro,” the derro said. “By definition . The highest of the high of the Slime Clan, who are the best of all the derro, just as the derro themselves are the best of all the races.”

Zaltys pointed to the thing hanging from the ceiling. “When that creature up there was Slime King, was it derro? By definition?”

“That’s what I just said ,” the savant said, scowling, and the eyes on her robe began to blink furiously. “Why can’t you listen ?” She jerked around on her heel and stalked off toward a doorway at the back of the Collegium, and Zaltys and Julen followed, because what else could they do? If they tried to leave, they might be allowed to walk right out, but more likely they’d be killed, or frozen and perched on pedestals. Bug-eater was still trailing along behind them, still aiming his crossbow generally in their direction, so cooperation seemed the wisest course.

The savant led them to a stone stairway that spiraled down for a few dozen feet before ending in another doorway. A wide hallway lined with open doors extended straight as a ruler before disappearing into gloom. There were lights down there, in the form of flickering smokeless torches set at irregular intervals, but they cast only small pools of light. “Straight down the end of the hallway,” the savant said. “And mind you don’t stray into the side rooms. They are sovereign microkingdoms, each populated and ruled by a single derro doing particularly interesting experiments, and if you pass over their thresholds you are subject to their absolute rule, which means, in practice, that horrible things would happen to you. As long as you stay here in the hallway, which is subject to the Slime King’s rule … Well, horrible things will probably still happen to you, but not as quickly.”

Zaltys couldn’t resist looking into the first few doorways they passed. What would a “sovereign microkingdom” of the derro look like? The first just had a naked derro, body covered in a calligraphy of scars, snoring on a pile of inexpertly-skinned pelts, flies buzzing around him. In the next, a robed derro sat at a work table, furiously sketching on pieces of thin hide with a chunk of charcoal grasped in his fist, and he would have looked like any scholar anywhere if not for the fact that one of his arms was missing, replaced by a long, ropy tentacle that lashed and twitched and writhed seemingly of its own accord.