Tim Pratt - Venom in Her Veins

“Huh,” Julen said, limping over, climbing up the side of the green mass, and plucking the dagger from the mound before climbing back down. “So that’s what this knife does. Pretty impressive magic.”

Zaltys stared at him. “Julen. You were poisoned .”

He rolled his eyes. “Cousin, I’m a Guardian . We specialize in poison, both adminstering it and surviving it. My father poisons my oatmeal in the mornings just to give me extra practice, and I’ve been taking tiny doses of various toxins to build up immunity since I was four years old. When I felt myself wavering, I realized she’d put something in my drink, and I took one of the emergency pills my father packed for me, for those occasions when one can’t avoid being poisoned. Tastes like charcoal, though I gather there’s magic in it too. Then I just played dead until I saw an opportune moment. I thought maybe this knife, being magical, might slip through her tentacles, but I didn’t expect this .” He prodded the mound of leaves with his foot. “Now I wonder even more who gave the dagger to me.”

“So you were awake,” Zaltys said. “You heard everything.” Her hope of somehow escaping and keeping the secret of her true nature drained away.

He shrugged. “So you’re yuan-ti. Great-uncle Gustavus is a lycanthrope, and-this is a Guardians secret-our head of overseas enforcement is an adopted half-orc, though he looks like a very tall and ugly human. You’re family , Zaltys. That’s what matters.”

She shook her head. “If that was all that mattered, why would mother have lied to me about what I am? And Krailash hates yuan-ti-she must have lied to him too, otherwise I think he’d have killed me out in the jungle years ago.”

Julen chewed his lip in thought. “Yuan-ti don’t seem like very nice people, but as far as that goes, we Serrats aren’t always very nice people, either. You were raised as one of us. You don’t worship the yuan-ti snake god, you don’t poison people, you aren’t-” he grinned “-especially subtle. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a Serrat. And your secret is safe with me.”

It was true. Zaltys didn’t worship Zehir, but knowing she was yuan-ti put her dreams and visions in a new context. She had no interest in Zehir, but what if that god of poisons and darkness was interested in her ?

“Do you think we should flee while we still can? Before something unspeakable squeezes itself out of that portal up there?”

Zaltys nodded. “Yes. But I need to go to the mushroom fields and free the slaves. Even if my villagers are snake people and cultists of Zehir, they’re still my people , and they deserve better than this.”

“All right,” Julen said, shrugging into his pack, but keeping the green-wrapped knife in his hand. “I’ve come with you this far, and I won’t turn my back on you just because your relatives turned out to be a little unsavory. I assumed they’d be uncouth jungle savages with dirt in their hair anyway. The fact that they’re fork-tongued, uncouth jungle savages who don’t have any hair at all shouldn’t change things substantially. I just hope they don’t try to kill us.” He inclined his head to the mound of vegetation, which was starting to go brown and die around the edges already, perhaps because Julen had removed the magical knife. “Do you think anyone will notice your auntie is out of commission?”

“No one sees the king while the king is the king,” Zaltys said. “I think we’re okay, assuming we can get upstairs without being killed. I wish we could kick this whole mess of greenery into the water, but it would be like trying to kick an orchard. I wonder if my mother left you the knife? It seems a bit primal, but I can’t imagine she’d have let you come down here if she’d known what we had planned.”

“We’ll ask her when we make it to the surface again.” They walked around the pool and unlatched the heavy wooden door. The guards outside didn’t pay them any attention as they emerged. Presumably the sentries were meant to keep people from going in, and had very little interest in whether anyone came out. The savant who’d led them downstairs was still on the ground, possibly dead, though the robe of eyes was gone. Her skin, pale as curdled milk, was covered in strange tattoos, also of eyes, but they were all closed, lids and long lashes drawn down.

Zaltys and Julen stepped over her gingerly and went up the stairs. They reached the hall of miniature kingdoms and tried not to look into them, but a voice called from the first one they passed. “Humans!” it shouted, and they looked in to see Bug-eater seated in an ornate (if chipped) gilded throne, his feet propped on a dead derro he’d arranged into a sort of corpse foot stool. “Was your meeting with the Slime King all you’d hoped?”

“Very informative,” Zaltys said. “Have you renounced your vow of incomprehensibility?”

“I am the lord of all I survey, excepting the hallway,” he said, “and so it behooves me to make myself understood. Would you like to come in for dinner? There’s a crack in the wall swarming with beetles. They taste a bit like gecko and a bit like bat and a bit like human.”

“Thank you. Perhaps another time.” Zaltys gave him a little bow, which Julen hastily copied, and Bug-eater waved at them in lofty dismissal.

An array of screams and grunts and the scrape of metal on bone emerged from the other rooms, but none of the other little kings called out to them as they went past. They ascended the far staircase without incident and emerged into the grand museum hall, which was strangely deserted. As they hurried among the exhibits, they saw why. One of the portals to the Far Realm, near the forge, was birthing a monstrosity of lashing tentacles, and all available derro had gone to man the nets to drag it down.

“If Iskara reveres things from that place so much, why does she capture them?” Julen said.

Zaltys shook her head. “I think Iskara is after something bigger . She mentioned something the size of a world with eyes. And she seemed to have contempt for these other aberrations. Didn’t you tell me aboleths are possibly the oldest things in the universe ?”

“So I’ve read. Do you think Iskara’s just insane? That she’s trying to open portals for something that doesn’t even exist?”

“Maybe,” Zaltys said. “But it’s not something I’d care to risk. I wish there was a way we could close these portals. It’s a shame they didn’t close when you killed Iskara.”

Julen frowned. “ Did I kill her, though? She was wrapped up in vines, yes, but is that enough to kill something as old and powerful as she seems to be? Or did we just trap her?”

“That’s a happy thought,” Zaltys said. “Let’s hurry and free the slaves and get out of here before we find out whether’s she’s dead or only inconvenienced.”

“All right, we’re probably looking for something near the mushroom fields, but those were vast, they fill almost this whole cavern, so where do we start-”

The pale snake came slithering down the steps, curled around Zaltys’s feet, and looked up at her. Zaltys stared at it.

“Ah,” Julen said after a moment. “Are you talking to the snake?”

“No,” Zaltys said. “I can’t do that, as far as I know. I’m just thinking. Trying to figure out whose pawn I am, exactly, and how I can be sure the next move I make is my own.” She flicked her fingertips at the snake. “Go on then. Show me the way to my family, or go away forever.”

The snake lowered its head and began undulating across the square, and Zaltys and Julen followed.

“I don’t understand,” Krailash said, staring at the portal, and the terazul vines. “The plants-they come from another plane ?”