Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“What are you talking about?” Zaltys said.

“My name is Iraska,” the Slime King said. “And I’m either your great-great-grandmother or your great-great-aunt.” She smiled, showing her teeth for the first time, and her canines were long and curved, like the fangs of a serpent.

Things in camp were going badly. Having the big boss, her daughter, the head of security, and half a dozen of the most dedicated guards leave unexpectedly tended to lead to a certain amount of shirking, lollygagging, malingering, and-even for those who weren’t actively lazy-general confusion and delay.

Worst of all, Glory had to let people see her, and remember her, and try to convince them that she was, in fact, qualified to give them orders. The morning after everyone else went underground, she stood in the center of camp on an improvised platform made of stacked crates and cleared her throat. The workers having their breakfast didn’t pay her any mind, and she realized she was still-automatically-blurring herself out of their mental vision. So she’d made herself visible, startling a few people nearby, and cleared her throat again. “Hello. Everyone. My name is Glory. I’m, ah, part of the camp leadership. Alaia and Krailash are off on an important errand, so they’ve put me in charge, and-”

“We’ve never seen you before!” one of the cooks shouted, the outburst followed by general muttering, including some, unfortunately, from armed men eating their breakfasts alongside the laborers.

“I keep to myself,” Glory said. “But I’m here now, so if there are any problems, you can bring them to me. Otherwise things should just proceed as-”

“She’s a tiefling,” a guard said. “You can’t trust them. She’s practically a devil. Probably sent from some cult of Asmodeus out in the jungle to seduce us all to destruction.” He sounded somewhat hopeful on that last point, and Glory wished she’d worn something a little less revealing. She wasn’t used to worrying about that sort of thing. She could sense the mood of the crowd, and while they weren’t about to attack her with pikes and torches, they also weren’t taking her leadership seriously. Not that she wanted to be a leader anyway .

Then Quelamia mounted the platform next to her, resplendent in her gold and green robes, holding a staff of living wood, her otherworldly eyes seeming to look at every face in the crowd at once. “You all know me,” she said, her voice loud and clear and carrying, though she didn’t particularly seem to be raising her voice. “I am the senior wizard of the Traveling Serrats, and I have sheltered you from storms, slain your enemies, and punished your transgressions, as your leader Alaia variously willed. I say to you now: this tiefling has been granted the authority to rule the caravan during Alaia’s absence. Her voice is the voice of the family, and to disobey her is to disobey the family, with all the dire consequences that implies. Do you all understand?”

The crowd shouted affirmation, and Quelamia nodded to those assembled, nodded rather more curtly to Glory, and descended the platform again, going about her business.

“Okay then,” Glory said. “As I was saying, if you have any concerns, you can come to me, otherwise just go about your jobs. You all know what to do.”

Before she could come down off the platform, people began shouting at her. The cooks complained that the hunting parties weren’t bringing back enough fresh meat. The hunters complained that half the barrels of arrows brought from the city were junk, shafts made of green wood and fletched with duck feathers, which was apparently an outrage. The interim guard captain, appointed by Krailash, had some question about guard rotations, which Glory couldn’t even begin to comprehend. The laborers wanted to know if they should go back to the same terazul vines they’d been harvesting yesterday, or move over to a more promising patch on the other side of some particular ruins, with the caveat that if they were supposed to go there, they’d need more guards, not to mention some men to go in and clear out some kind of poisonous bush first. The scouts wanted to know if they should take men to destroy a troop of guardian apes they’d noticed, though they were about half a mile outside the official perimeter, just in case the apes came over to make trouble later. The guard who’d worried she was here to seduce them all wanted to know why he hadn’t seen her around camp before and let her know he had a flask of some fine liquor if she was looking to unwind. And, and, and …

Glory began to rub her temples as a headache started to throb. How did Alaia deal with this? There didn’t seem to be people pounding on her door all the time. Probably Krailash handled a lot of it, and many of these people probably took care of their own damn problems rather than bother the supreme boss, but as far as they were concerned Glory was just a hireling like them, not Family, and thus, not untouchable.

Eventually Glory got them to form an orderly line and ask their questions one at a time, and then she just looked inside their minds to see what they thought the best decision would be, and then simply agreed with those, for the most part-she’d learned long ago that at least half the people who ask questions really just want confirmation that their inclinations are the right way to go.

The guard who wanted to share his liquor was told to come to her wagon after sunset, because even if he was an idiot and a bigot, he had lovely biceps, and she could always make him forget he’d even talked to her afterward. Mind-controlling someone into wanting physical intimacy was a monstrous crime, but wiping the mind of an attractive moron after some consensual fun was just sensible relationship management. Her power had spared her a lot of bad consequences from ill-advised one-night frolics. Shame it wasn’t sparing her from her first horrible foray into leadership.

“It’s hard bossing people around when you don’t want them to know you exist,” Glory complained, dropping into a chair in Alaia’s trailer. The eladrin wizard Quelamia was there, apparently staring at nothing, which probably meant she was doing very important mental work. Glory had never peeked into Quelamia’s mind-wizards were touchy about their secrets, and the fey were hard to read anyway, and okay, Glory had tried once, and Quelamia had some formidable psychic barriers-but she wondered, sometimes, what it was like inside that cool and aloof head. Green and tranquil, quite unlike Glory’s own fiery red and char black thoughts? “Feel free to, you know, jump in and tell people what to do out there in camp any time. I’m not cut out for managing people. At least, not that way. Making people do stuff is one thing. Telling them to do things is a whole different proposition. I don’t like it.”

“Do you believe in evil?” Quelamia said. She didn’t look at Glory, but the psion decided to assume the question was meant for her.

She pointed to her horns. “I’m a tiefling. I’ve got evil in my ancestry. Of course I believe in it. Is this about Zaltys again?”

“But many call their enemies evil,” Quelamia said, “even if they are not so different from themselves. Some would call the Serrats evil. The effects of terazul are often terrible, and without the family’s trade, that poison would be far less widespread. And how many evil creatures consider themselves evil? There are some, certainly-degenerate races and dark gods and undead wizards and ancient dragons that revel in cruelty, but I’m sure many of them don’t actually consider themselves evil so much as superior. More important than anyone else, and willing to do terrible things to further their own interests, no more concerned about the deaths they’d cause than Krailash worries about stepping on ants. Some of those creatures are simply mad. Is madness the same as evil? Are the evil, by definition, also mad? Even when they seem cold, calculating, and sane?”